Article published in:
Specialised Translation in Spain: Institutional dimensions
Edited by José Santaemilia-Ruiz and Sergio Maruenda-Bataller
[Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada/Spanish Journal of Applied Linguistics 30:2] 2017
► pp. 465–490

Researching the European Parliament with Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies

From the micro- and macro-levels of text to the macro-context

| Universitat Jaume I

Parliaments are important and complex institutions. However, they are notably under-researched within linguistics and related fields. This is certainly the case with the European Parliament (EP). Drawing both on Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) and prior, manual research on parliamentary communication, this paper proposes and applies an analytical protocol to examine EP speeches. Although these are disseminated in various forms and through dissimilar means (e.g., live at the EP; the audiovisual format via streaming or recorded videos; or published as parliamentary proceedings), here we focus on proceedings – one of the EP’s main sources of official representation. Following the EP’s (unique) practice, where official proceedings do not distinguish between original and translated speeches but consider all texts of equal (legal) status, this study delves into all speech production in English, without separating source and target texts. In the most orthodox of CADS traditions, analysis proceeds from micro and macro-levels of texts into the macro-context (unlike other academic approaches, in which it proceeds in the opposite direction). This direction forces us to move from tangible, specific data to the enveloping setting in which these data are exchanged.

Keywords: political discourse, European Parliament, corpus linguistics, Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS), ECPC
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS)
    • 2.1Corpus tools for analysis
    • 2.2The ECPC corpus archive
    • 2.3The informing theory
      • 2.3.1The micro-level of parliamentary texts
      • 2.3.2The macro-level of parliamentary texts
      • 2.3.3The macro-level of parliamentary context
    • 2.4Proposed analytical method
  • 3.Analyzing EP_en corpus: From text to context
    • 3.1Set of analyses 1
      • 3.1.1Step 1: Out of the micro-level of text
      • 3.1.2Step 2: Into the macro-context
    • 3.2From the macro-level of text to the macro-context
      • 3.2.1Step 1: Out of the macro-level of text
      • 3.2.2Step 2: Into the macro-context
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 26 March 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/resla.00003.cal
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