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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
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