Cover not available
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
References (41)
References
Antaki, Charles, and Ivan Leudar. 2001. “Recruiting the Record: Using Opponents’ Exact Words in Parliamentary Argumentation.” Text 21 (4): 467–488.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bates, Stephen R., Peter Kerr, Christopher Byrne, and Liam Stanley. 2014. “Questions to the Prime Minister: A Comparative Study of PMQs from Thatcher to Cameron.” Parliamentary Affairs 67 (2): 253–280.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bayley, Paul, Cinzia Bevitori, and Elizabetta Zoni. 2004. “Threat and Fear in Parliamentary Debates in Britian, Germany and Italy”. In Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Parliamentary Discourse, ed. by Paul Bayley, 185–236. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Biber, Douglas. 1988. Variation across Speech and Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 1995. Dimensions of Register Variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bucholtz, Mary. 2000. “The Politics of Transcription.” Journal of Pragmatics 32 (10): 1439–1465.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bull, Peter, and Pam Wells. 2012. “Adversarial Discourse in Prime Minister’s Questions.” Journal of Language and Social Psychology 31 (1): 30–48.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cameron, Deborah, and Sylvia Shaw. 2016. Gender, Power and Political Speech: Women and Language in the 2015 UK General Election. Basingstoke: Palgrave Pivot UK.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Carbó, Teresa. 1992. “Towards an Interpretation of Interruptions in Mexican Parliamentary Discourse (1920–60).” Discourse & Society 3 (1): 25–45.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Charteris-Black, Jonathan. 2014. Analysing Political Speeches: Rhetoric, Discourse and Metaphor. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chilton, Paul A. 2004. Analysing Political Discourse: Theory and Practice. London: Routledge.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cook, Guy. 1990. “Transcribing Infinity: Problems of Context Presentation.” Journal of Pragmatics 14: 1–24.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Demmen, Jane, Lesley Jeffries, and Brian Walker. 2018. “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 Doing Politics. Discursivity, performativity and mediation in political discourse, edited by Michael Kranert and Geraldine Horan, 81–104. Discourse approaches to politics, society and culture (DAPSAC) 80. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.Google Scholar
Duff, Patricia A., and Celia Roberts. 1997. “The Politics of Transcription; Transcribing Talk: Issues of Representation.” TESOL Quarterly 31 (1): 167–172.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fairclough, Norman, and Isabela Fairclough. 2012. Political Discourse Analysis: A Method for Advanced Students. Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Fenton-Smith, Ben. 2008. “Discourse Structure and Political Performance in Adversarial Parliamentary Questioning.” Journal of Language and Politics 7 (1): 97–118.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gee, James Paul. 2014. An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method. 4th edn. London; New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Hamilton, Craig, Laura Hidalgo Downing, Robert Cockcroft, and Susan Cockcroft. 2014. Persuading People: An Introduction to Rhetoric. 3rd edn. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Harris, Sandra. 2001. “Being Politically Impolite: Extending Politeness Theory to Adversarial Political Discourse.” Discourse & Society 12 (4): 451–472.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hughes, Rebecca. 1996. English in Speech and Writing: Investigating Language and Literature. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Ilie, Cornelia. 2013. “Gendering Confrontational Rhetoric: Discursive Disorder in the British and Swedish Parliaments.” Democratization 20 (3): 501–521.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kress, Gunther. 1986. “Language in the Media: The Construction of the Domains of Public and Private.” Media, Culture & Society 8: 395–419.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Langdon, David. 1969. Punch Magazine available at: [URL] (accessed 1 May 2016).
Martin, James. 2014. Politics and Rhetoric: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Mollin, Sandra. 2007. “The Hansard Hazard: Gauging the Accuracy of British Parliamentary Transcripts.” Corpora 2 (2): 187–210.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nicholas, Sian. 2001. “Churchill’s Radio Imposter?” History Today 51 (2): 5–6.Google Scholar
Ochs, Elinor. 1979. “Transcription as Theory.” In Developmental Pragmatics, ed. by Elinor Ochs, and Bambi Schiefflen, 43–72. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Ramagobin, Ryan. 2015. “Mhairi Black’s Maiden Speech Hits 10 Million Online Views.” Independent, July 20. [URL].
Reid, Christopher. 2014. “Rhetoric and Parliamentary Leadership – Prime Minister’s Questions.” In Rhetoric in British Politics and Society, ed. by Judi Atkins, Alan Finlayson, James Martin, and Nick Turnbull, 45–57. Basingstoke ; New York: Macmillan Palgrave.Google Scholar
Reisigl, Martin. 2010. “Rhetoric of Political Speeches”. In Handbook of Communication in the Public Sphere, ed. by Ruth Wodak, and Veronika Koller, 243–270. Berlin/NewYork: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson. 1974. “A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation.” Language 50 (4): 696–735.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Shaw, Sylvia. forthcoming. Women, Language and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
. 2000. “Language, Gender and Floor Apportionment in Political Debates.” Discourse & Society 11 (3): 401–418.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2006. “Governed by the Rules? The Female Voice in Parliamentary Debates.” In Speaking Out: The Female Voice in Public Contexts, ed. by Judith Baxter, 81–102. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Shenhav, Shaul R. 2008. “Showing and Telling in Parliamentary Discourse: The Case of Repeated Interjections to Rabin’s Speeches in the Israeli Parliament.” Discourse & Society 19 (2): 223–255.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Slembrouck, Stef. 1992. “The Parliamentary Hansard “Verbatim” Report: The Written Construction of Spoken Discourse.” Language and Literature 1 (2): 101–120.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Spary, Carole. 2010. “Disrupting Rituals of Debate in the Indian Parliament.” The Journal of Legislative Studies 16 (3): 338–351.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Trewin, J. C. 1952. Printers to the House: The Story of ‘Hansard’. London: Methuen.Google Scholar
Van Dijk, Teun A. 2000. “On the Analysis of Parliamentary Debates on Immigration.” In The Semiotics of Racism: Approaches to Critical Discourse Analysis, ed. by Martin Reisigl, and Ruth Wodak, 85–103. Vienna: Passagen Verlag.Google Scholar
Vice, John, and Stephen Farrell. 2017. The History of Hansard. London. House of Lords Hansard and the House of Lords Library.Google Scholar
Wintour, Patrick. 2011. “Labour Fury as David Cameron Tells Angela Eagle: “Calm Down, Dear”.” Guardian, April 27. [URL].
Cited by (3)

Cited by three other publications

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
Wissik, Tanja
2021. Encoding Interruptions in Parliamentary Data: From Applause to Interjections and Laughter. Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative :Issue 14 DOI logo
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

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 14 november 2024. 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.