Languaging the Riots: A Corpus-based Investigation of the Rioters’ Identity as Reported by the British Press

The present paper will focus on the linguistic representations of the 2011 UK riots and some of the participants involved, the rioters, as emerging from the British press. A corpus of newspaper articles was collected over a period of time ranging from August 1st to December 31st, 2011, from six British newspapers, i.e. The Guardian, The Times, The Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Daily Mirror and The Sun.Previous studies on past riots in the UK in 1981 and 1985 were invariably characterised by a series of recurring features in the portrayal of the rioters, among them the identification of the rioters and offenders with ethnic minorities. The only existing literature on the subject highlighted the fact that press discourse tended to construe the rioters’ identity in ethnic and racial terms by locating them within binary oppositions contrasting Britons and immigrants, whites and coloured, us and them, hence the prevailing and generalised reference to ‘race riots’.Starting from such investigation, our corpus-based discourse analysis (Baker 2006, Baker et al. 2008, Gabrielatos and Baker 2008, Morley and Bailey 2009) will focus on the way in which the main actors of the events, the rioters, are referred to in the corpus, showing both common trends in the reporting of the 2011 events and differences among the six newspapers as far as naming strategies and collocational choices are concerned. Findings will then be interpreted taking into account the general analysis of what happened according to sociological studies and in comparison/contrast with the traditional notion of race riots.