Kinship references in the British Parliament, 1800–2005

Tyrkkö, Jukka

doi:10.1075/pbns.306.04tyr

Part of

Reference and Identity in Public Discourses
Edited by Ursula Lutzky and Minna Nevala
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 306] 2019
► pp. 97–124

Kinship references in the British Parliament, 1800–2005

Jukka Tyrkkö | Linnaeus University

Family and kinship are fundamental concepts of human society and of political governance. Proceeding from the notion that frequency of reference can be taken as a simple measure of visibility and representation, this study examines diachronic trends of kinship reference in British parliamentary debates from 1800 to 2005. Using the Hansard Corpus and pattern-driven corpus linguistic methods, I show that changes in the frequencies of reference to kin reflect societal attitudes to gender roles.

Keywords: kinship, representation, reference, parliamentary debate, corpus, pattern, political discourse

Article outline

1.Introduction
2.Theoretical background
3.The Hansard Corpus as a linguistic resource
4.Operationalization of the queries and analyses
5.Findings
- 5.1Overall trends
- 5.2Cluster analysis and some significant trends
6.Tentative conclusions
Acknowledgements
Notes
References
Appendix

Published online: 21 October 2019

https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.306.04tyr

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