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Charting the semantics of labour relations in House of Commons debates spanning two hundred years: A study of parliamentary language using corpus linguistic methods and automated semantic tagging

Research output: Contribution in Book/Report/Proceedings - With ISBN/ISSNChapter (peer-reviewed)peer-review

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Publication date12/12/2018
Host publicationDoing Politics: Discursivity, performativity and mediation in political discourse
EditorsMichael Kranert, Geraldine Horan
PublisherJohn Benjamins
Pages81-104
Number of pages24
ISBN (electronic)9789027263148
ISBN (print)9789027201935
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Publication series

NameDiscourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture
PublisherJohn Benjamins

Abstract

In this chapter we use new corpus linguistic software tools to investigate the discourse(s) of labour relations in UK House of Commons debates over the 19th and 20th centuries. Our data is from the Hansard Corpus (1803–2005), and benefits from the annotation of meaning and sense categories with the newly-developed Historical Thesaurus Semantic Tagger (Alexander et al. 2015; Piao et al. 2014). Using the bespoke corpus interface CQPweb Hansard, we carry out automated searches for words tagged with relevant semantic category codes. Our quantitative results enable us to chart the semantics of parliamentary discourse on labour relations over time, providing a detailed empirical basis which, we argue, would usefully support further qualitative analysis in linguistic and other research.