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Ideological viewpoint
Our answer for task B [5]
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Our men are...
Boys
Lads
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Their men are...
Troops
Troops
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Here the basis for the contrast is Subject-Predicator-Complement (SPC)
structure, with variation in the complement noun phrase. The lexical opposition
is obvious enough here, and parallels the 'We vs. They' opposition in
(3), in that the complement used for the Iraqi troops is more normal and
the British equivalent suggests that the British troops are young and
vulnerable (compare the equivalent use of the neutral term 'men' by the
Guardian writer in the subject slot). 'Boys' and 'lads' also seem
more individual and human connotatively than the more general term 'troops'.
The unnecessary repetition of the word 'troops' like that for 'destroy'
and 'kill' earlier, indicates a somewhat elicit 'winding up' of the contrast
by the writer.
It should also be clear by now that each of the 'sections' of the list
we are exploring are each related to a particular clause-structure parallelism,
which is different for each section. The basis of the contrast is thus
a use of the  which
we explored in the topic on foregrounding in poetry, and which is being
used here to suggest a contrastive, antonymic reading of the two columns.
The parallelism in this text is both syntactic and graphological.
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