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Part of
Doing Politics: Discursivity, performativity and mediation in political discourse
Edited by Michael Kranert and Geraldine Horan
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 80] 2018
► pp. 81–104

Chapter 4
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

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.

Keywords: labour relations, Hansard Corpus, political debate, semantic annotation, tagging
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The HTST and the SAMUELS project
  • 3.The Hansard Corpus
  • 4.Identifying words relating to labour relations using HT semantic categories
  • 5.The semantics of labour relations in House of Commons debates over time
    • 5.1Quantifying labour relations talk in House of Commons debates overall
    • 5.2Semantic categories of labour relations data
    • 5.3The semantics of associations of employers/employees
    • 5.4The semantics of labour relations actions
    • 5.5The semantics of people involved in labour relations
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgement
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 12 December 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.80.04dem
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