This article argues that metalinguistic documents in historical archives are a useful source for political discourse analysts to explore. With reference to the archives of the British Ministry of Information in World War II, it shows that such documents are revealing of the orders of discourse and the language ideologies that contribute to the production of political discourse. Archival documents can help us to understand the ways in which political actors conceive of the linguistic strategies that are typically the focus of our discourse analytic work. In a field which places great theoretical emphasis on the contextual significance of political language, archival documents thus represent a crucial, but hitherto overlooked, source of evidence. More specifically, the article demonstrates that the Ministry of Information’s civil servants paid a great deal of attention to language, working in highly reflexive ways to produce their discourse, and that one of the linguistic strategies that was particularly intensely discussed was the use of informal and personalised language. Those civil servants were working on a ‘synthetically personalised’ language half a century before discourse analysts began paying sustained attention to such a strategy.

中文翻译：

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信息部与英国二战宣传的语言设计：档案文件可以告诉我们有关政治话语的信息

本文认为，历史档案中的元语言文献是政治话语分析家探索的有用来源。参考二战时期英国信息部的档案，这些文件揭示了有助于政治话语产生的话语秩序和语言意识形态。档案文件可以帮助我们了解政治行动者如何构思语言策略，而这些语言策略通常是我们话语分析工作的重点。在一个非常重视政治语言语境意义的理论领域，档案文件因此代表了一个至关重要但迄今为止被忽视的证据来源。进一步来说，文章表明，信息部的公务员非常重视语言，以高度反思性的方式来制作他们的话语，并且特别激烈讨论的语言策略之一是使用非正式和个性化的语言。半个世纪以来，这些公务员正在研究一种“综合个性化”的语言，然后话语分析家才开始持续关注这种策略。