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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. 105–126

Chapter 5
Off the record

The transcription of parliamentary debates for political discourse analysis

This chapter examines the benefits and drawbacks of using Official Reports, such as the UK House of Commons “Hansard” for political discourse analysis. Previous studies identifying transformations that occur to the oral version of events in the process of constructing Official Reports (e.g. Slembrouck 1992) show that transcribers and editors make significant changes and omissions, raising questions about their suitability for the analysis of parliamentary discourse. Acknowledging the theoretical, analytical and interpretative elements of all transcriptions, I critically appraise different types of political discourse analysis that use UK Official Report data. I conclude with some suggestions about the categories affected by Official Report transformations, and suggest that using this data for the analysis of parliamentary discourse should always be critical and reflexive.

Keywords: discourse analysis, transcription, Official Report, Hansard, political discourse, parliamentary debates, linguistic data, representation, speech and writing
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • The Official Report (OR), the Hansard, and the representation of speech in writing
  • Transcription as theory and research practice
  • The benefits and drawbacks of using or data for the analysis of political discourse
  • Does it matter? Can we use the Official Report(s) for analysing political discourse?
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 12 December 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.80.05sha
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Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Demmen, Jane, Lesley Jeffries & Brian Walker
2018. Chapter 4. Charting the semantics of labour relations in House of Commons debates spanning two hundred years. In Doing Politics [Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture, 80], ► pp. 81 ff. DOI logo
Jeffries, Lesley, Fransina Stradling, Alex von Lünen & Hugo Sanjurjo-González
2023. Chapter 3. Hansard at Huddersfield. In Exploring Language and Society with Big Data [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 111], ► pp. 89 ff. DOI logo

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