Defining, labelling and evaluating poverty: A corpus-based discourse analysis of category construction in The Times newspaper 1900–2009

This paper explores the construction of different understandings of poverty in The Times newspaper (1900–2009). Using corpus-based discourse analysis, it examines the premodification of poverty with different nouns. Rising to prominence from the 1950s onwards, the resulting compound nouns, including world poverty and child poverty, facilitate the discursive construction of different types of poverty as distinct entities. Through close reading of concordance lines and collocate analysis, the paper investigates how these categories are presented as qualitatively similar/different and discusses how such representations reflect broader ideological contexts in the UK.