American National Identity Language Patterns and Myths Across the Centuries

This book offers an analytical tool for identifying and analysing the linguistic mechanisms that shape American national identity in public discourses. Drawing on methods from (critical) discourse analysis and corpus linguistics, the authors provide insights into various levels of discourse structures, consider the social and political climate of the US at different stages of its history, trace the diachronic development of the linguistic patterns that shape the American national identity, and conduct a thorough discursive analysis of seminal texts such as The Declaration of Independence and the Preamble to the US Constitution. This book defines the key linguistic markers of the American national identity and provides an insight into how these markers are used to promote various ideologies in the pluralistic world of the contemporary USA. This monograph will be of interest to students and scholars working in fields such as Applied Linguistics, (Critical) Discourse Studies, Cultural Studies, US History and Politics.

Chapter 1:- Introduction.- Background and Methodological Framework.- Chapter 2:- Something Borrowed.- Chapter 3:- The Rural Idyll?.- Chapter 4:- Mending ‘A More Perfect Union’.- Chapter 5:- The Nation and the Race.- Chapter 6:- Inspiring the Nation.- Chapter 7:- From ‘The Pursuit of Happiness’ to ‘The American Dream’.- Chapter 8:- Speaking in Many Voices.- Chapter 9:- Conclusion.

Anna Islentyeva is a post-doctoral research associate and lecturer in linguistics in the English Department at the Universität Innsbruck, Austria.

Igor Tolochin is a professor in the Department of English Philology and Cultural Studies at St. Petersburg State University, Russia.