ABSTRACT
This chapter is premised on the belief that an important element of the origins and distinctiveness of the UK-US special relationship lies in the way in which Anglo-American political elites and media constructed it over time through language. It explains the Sinews of Peace speech as a historical marker for the subsequent discursive construction of a modern Anglo-American special relationship. By combining diplomatic history with Corpus Assisted Discourse Analysis (CADS), the chapter examines through government and media texts how notions of special Anglo-American relations were subsequently evolved discursively. Focusing in particular on Winston Churchill's role in the articulation and mediation of a special relationship, it demonstrates how political and media elites in early 1950s began to articulate and culturally embed the notion of a unique Anglo-American relationship. The chapter also adopts a broad analytical framework of Corpus Linguistics. Corpus Linguistics is, the study of language based on use of large collections of texts and of computational tools to interrogate them.
