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Article published In:
Pragmatics
Vol. 29:3 (2019) ► pp.357–383

The group in the self

A corpus-assisted discourse studies approach to personal and group communication at the European Parliament

ORCID logo | Universitat Jaume I
Drawing on theoretical approaches to personal/group behaviour, and informed by Michael Hoey’s priming theory, this paper presents a corpus-assisted discourse study of European Parliament interventions from 2004 to 2011. The study aims to identify the group in the self and the various selves in the individual. For the analysis, three corpora from the European Comparable and Parallel Corpus Archive are explored: EP_EN (with EP interventions: 26,959,446 tokens), HC (with House of Commons interventions: 70,567,728), and SandD_david_martin (with member of European Parliament – MEP – David Martin’s interventions: 116,781). The main tool of analysis is the keyword, as generated by WordSmith 7.0. The analysis proceeds in three stages: stage 1, where the EP_EN and HC wordlists are compared, resulting in EP key priming; stage 2, where the SandD_david_martin and HC wordlists are compared, exposing David Martin’s idiosyncratic productions; and stage 3, where the EP_EN and SandD_david_martin keyword lists are manually compared, leading to the identification of EP priming in David Martin’s interventions.
Keywords: personal/group behaviour, parliamentary discourse, corpus-assisted discourse studies, priming theory, European Parliament, European comparable, parallel corpus
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Brief outline of personal and group behaviour according to SIT and SCT
    • 1.2Brief outline of a corpus linguistics approach to personal and group communication: Priming theory through keyword analysis
  • 2.Analysis of European Parliament plenary interventions and MEP David Martin’s production via keyword analysis
    • 2.1Demarcation of context and genre
    • 2.2Selection of a specific individual for analysis
    • 2.3The European Comparable and Parallel Corpus as archive of corpora for analysis
    • 2.4Stages of analysis
  • 3.Results of analysis
    • 3.1Stage 1: Comparison of proximal groups (EP_EN and HC) → Keyword List A: Stereotypical (key) group priming
    • 3.2Stage 2: Comparison of proximal groups (SandD_david_martin and HC) → Keyword List B: Stereotypical (key) personal priming
    • 3.3Stage 3: Comparison of EP_EN Keyword List A and SandD_david_martin Keyword List B → The group in the self and various selves in stereotypical personal production
  • 4.Conclusions
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 22 February 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.18026.cal
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