Cover not available
Part of
Exploring Future Paths for Historical Sociolinguistics
Edited by Tanja Säily, Arja Nurmi, Minna Palander-Collin and Anita Auer
[Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 7] 2017
► pp. 83–107

Ireland in British parliamentary debates 1803–2005

Plotting changes in discourse in a large volume of time-series corpus data

| Lancaster University
| Lancaster University
| Lancaster University
This study investigates the changing contexts in which the word ireland appears in the Hansard Corpus of British parliamentary debates. It combines the use of two statistical techniques for analysis and visualization of historical data (Meaning Fluctuation Analysis and sparklines) with a more qualitative examination of concordance lines from the corpus. The full historical context of the patterns observed in the parliamentary data is also provided. We show that the sophisticated corpus techniques have the ability to draw our attention to important points in the time series, which need to be further investigated within the context of the larger historical picture.
Keywords: statistics, visualization, diachronic changes, Meaning Fluctuation Analysis, sparklines, collocations, Hansard Corpus , Ireland, parliamentary debates
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Historical sociolinguistics, historical discourse analysis and the corpus approach to the study of history
  • 3.The corpus
  • 4.The challenge of identifying major shifts in discourse in a very large corpus
  • 5.Trough one: The Great Famine, 1845–1848, historical background
  • 6.Trough one: The Great Famine, 1845–1848, corpus analysis
  • 7.Trough two: The establishment of the Irish Republic, historical background
  • 8.Trough two: The establishment of the Irish Republic, corpus analysis
  • 9.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 19 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ahs.7.04bak
References
Abercrombie, David
1963 Pseudo-procedures in linguistics. STUF – Language Typology and Universals 16(1–4). 9–12. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Alexander, Marc & Mark Davies
2015 The Hansard Corpus 1803–2005. [URL] (16 December, 2016.)Google Scholar
Anderson, James & Ian Shuttleworth
1998 Sectarian demography, territoriality and political development in Northern Ireland. Political Geography 17(2). 187–208. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Boyce, D. George
1996 The Irish Question and British politics, 1868–1996. Basingstoke, Hampshire & London: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Boyle, Phelim P. & Cormac Ó. Gráda
1986 Fertility trends, excess mortality, and the Great Irish Famine. Demography 23(4). 543–562. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brezina, Vaclav, Tony McEnery & Helen Baker
In preparation. Meaning fluctuation analysis: A new way of analysing shifts in historical discourse.
Brezina, Vaclav, Tony McEnery & Stephen Wattam
2015 Collocations in context: A new perspective on collocation networks. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 20(2). 139–173. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brinton, Laurel J.
2001 Historical discourse analysis. In Deborah Tannen, Heidi E. Hamilton & Deborah Schiffrin (eds.), The handbook of discourse analysis, 138–160. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Cairns, Ed & John Darby
1998 The conflict in Northern Ireland: Causes, consequences, and controls. American Psychologist 53(7). 754–760. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Clark, Gemma
2014 Everyday violence in the Irish Civil War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Clark, Samuel
1979 Social origins of the Irish Land War. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Coogan, Tim Pat
1995 The Troubles: Ireland’s ordeal 1966–1995 and the search for peace. London: Hutchinson.Google Scholar
Cronin, Mike
2001 A history of Ireland. Basingstoke, Hampshire & London: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Cullen, L. M.
1972 An economic history of Ireland since 1660. London: B. T. Batsford.Google Scholar
Daly, Mary E.
1986 The famine in Ireland. Dundalk: Dundalgan Press.Google Scholar
Diggle, P. J.
2000 Overview of statistical methods for disease mapping and its relationship to cluster detection. In Paul Elliott, Jon C. Wakefield, Nicola G. Best & David J. Briggs (eds.), Spatial epidemiology: Methods and applications, 87–103. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Fitzpatrick, David
2013 Ethnic cleansing, ethical smearing and Irish historians. History 88(329). 135–144. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gabrielatos, Costas, Tony McEnery, P. J. Diggle & Paul Baker
2012 The peaks and troughs of corpus-based contextual analysis. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 17(2). 151–175. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Goldstrom, J. M.
1981 Irish agriculture and the Great Famine. In J. M. Goldstrom & L. A. Clarkson (eds.), Irish population, economy and society: Essays in honour of the late K. H. Connell, 155–172. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Green, E. R. R.
1956 Agriculture. In R. Dudley Edwards & T. Desmond Williams (eds.), The Great Famine: Studies in Irish history, 1845–1852, 89–128. Dublin: Lilliput Press.Google Scholar
Gries, Stefan Th. & Martin Hilpert
2008 The identification of stages in diachronic data: Variability-based neighbour clustering. Corpora 3(1). 59–81. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gwet, Kilem
2002 Inter-rater reliability: Dependency on trait prevalence and marginal homogeneity. Statistical Methods for Inter-Rater Reliability Assessment Series 2. 1–9.Google Scholar
Hilpert, Martin & Stefan Th. Gries
2009 Assessing frequency changes in multistage diachronic corpora: Applications for historical corpus linguistics and the study of language acquisition. Literary and Linguistic Computing 24(4). 385–401. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hoppen, K. Theodore
1989 Ireland since 1800: Conflict and conformity. London & New York: Longman.Google Scholar
Mawe, Timothy
2012 A comparative survey of the historical debates surrounding Ireland, World War I and the Irish Civil War. Online supplement to History Studies 13, [URL] (16 December, 2016.)Google Scholar
McEnery, Tony & Helen Baker
2016 Corpus linguistics and 17th-century prostitution: Computational linguistics and history. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
McMahon, Sean
2001 Rebel Ireland: From Easter Rising to Civil War. Cork: Mercier Press.Google Scholar
Mokyr, Joel
1980 The deadly fungus: An econometric investigation into the short term demographic impact of the Irish Famine. Research in Population Economics 2. 237–277.Google Scholar
Nevalainen, Terttu
1999 Making the best use of ‘bad’ data: Evidence for sociolinguistic variation in Early Modern English. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 100(4). 499–533.Google Scholar
Nevalainen, Terttu & Helena Raumolin-Brunberg
2017 Historical sociolinguistics: Language change in Tudor and Stuart England. Abingdon: Routledge.Google Scholar
Ó Gráda, Cormac
1988 Ireland before and after the famine: Explorations in economic history, 1800–1925. Manchester: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
Regan, John M.
2010 Irish public histories as an historiographical problem. Irish Historical Studies 37(146). 265–292. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rudwick, Martin
2004 Scrope, George Julius Poulett (1797–1876). In H. C. G. Matthew & Brian Harrison (eds.), Oxford dictionary of national biography, Online edn. David Cannadine, (ed.), October 2007 Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Taavitsainen, Irma
2002 Historical discourse analysis: Scientific language and changing thought-styles. In Teresa Fanego, Belén Méndez-Naya & Elena Seoane (eds.), Sounds, words, texts and change, vol. 2 (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 224), 201–226. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Townshend, Charles
2006 Easter 1916: The Irish rebellion. London: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Tufte, Edward
2006 Beautiful evidence. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 4 other publications

Brezina, Vaclav
2018. Statistics in Corpus Linguistics, DOI logo
Gillings, Mathew & Carmen Dayrell
2023. Climate change in the UK press: Examining discourse fluctuation over time. Applied Linguistics DOI logo
Mair, Christian
2023. Chapter 4. Empire, migration and race in the British parliament (1803–2005). In Exploring Language and Society with Big Data [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 111], ► pp. 118 ff. DOI logo
McEnery, Tony, Vaclav Brezina & Helen Baker
2022. Usage Fluctuation Analysis. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics ► pp. 413 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 18 november 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.