Browsing by Subject "Great Britain"

This Master’s thesis explored the British national identity in the early phases of the Brexit process in the years 2017–2018. The aim of the study was to examine whether a new non-EU British identity which could be detected in the speeches by Prime Minister Theresa May and what kinds of linguistic devices were employed in the construction of such identity. I approached these questions with a triangulating method which finds its home in Critical Discourse Analysis. The data consisted of transcriptions of May’s three speeches: the first one was given in London in January 2017, the second one in Florence, Italy in September in 2017 and the third one again in London in March 2018, as a storm prevented May from traveling to Manchester. I attempted to observe the respective temporal and spatial contexts, as well as the imagined audience in my analysis. I first conducted a quantitative analysis of the data by employing the Appraisal Framework developed by Martin and White. This framework is designed to recognise value positions encased in a text. It is based on Systemic Functional Linguistics and Bakhtin’s ideas on dialogic language. I.e. it views language as a semiotic system of inter-referential signs which is constructed in interaction. I applied the framework to the extent of Engagement. This category of the framework is specifically concerned with dialogic utterances. In the qualitative analysis, I applied several social scientific approaches and concepts related to questions of nation and national identity. In terms of dialogic language, the results displayed that over time May’s speeches began to contain less contractive utterances in which one would exclude other positions from the discourse. At the same time, there was an increase of expansive utterances in which one would allow other positions to seem plausible or neutral. In other words, May seemed to opt for a more conciliatory tone as Brexit visibly decelerated. When it comes to national identity, it would seem like a crucial concept for a state looking for less integrated international co-operation especially if pursuit of national sovereignty is presented as the main reason behind the endeavour. However, this study implies that May’s speeches did not offer elements which a new national identity could have been built upon. In the light of previous research on national identity, they would have evidently needed to contain more emotion-laden language.

This Master's Thesis concerns the British middle-class soldiers' psychological experience as volunteers in Kitchener's army during the Great War. The purpose of this study is to discover how the war affected the soldiers, and why they reacted to it the way they did. It approaches this question by focusing on four aspects of the war from the soldier's perspective, namely: the military organization, his brothers in arms, the act of killing, and the threat of dying. The motivation behind this study was to better understand the experience of these soldiers after they voluntarily joined the world’s first industrial war. Kitchener's army was an army of civilian soldiers, drafted to fill in the ranks of the British army, so that it could properly take part in the war. Through using both relevant historical literature and psychological research as aid, the study uses primary sources in the form of letters and diaries from the trenches to understand and draw conclusions of the experiences personally recounted by the soldiers. The methods with which the study was conducted was through the close-reading of the sources combined with the reading and reviewing of relevant research literature to draw appropriate conclusions. The theoretical framework and subsequent analysis of the sources thus relies heavily on psychological concepts. The concept of masculinity in the contemporary middle-class culture was used to contextualize the soldiers’ experience in their historical timeframe and social niche. Meanwhile, the key psychological terms used in this study in reference to group behavior and stress responses are concepts recognized on the field of psychological research either as defense or coping mechanisms. Where defense mechanisms are commonly understood as unconscious and automatic reactions of the mind to potentially stressful information, coping mechanisms are at least partially consciously driven and maintained by the person themselves to help them refrain from having to face and process the information which they know to be painful. The conclusions of this study imply that the soldier’s social background influenced their war experience both before and after joining the war, giving them a frame of reference for both their set of values and their code of conduct which they drew upon as they adjusted to the life in the trenches. What this study’s results also imply is that while the soldiers had distinctly individual experiences of their own, they were characterized by a set of culturally and psychologically guided features, which hold within themselves a level of predictability. These conclusions suggest that though each experience of soldiers in war is unique, there are broader patterns of behavior within the context of modern warfare, which if understood, could better help predict and understand the behavior of soldiers in comparable circumstances.