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Part of
Exploring Language and Society with Big Data: Parliamentary discourse across time and space
Edited by Minna Korhonen, Haidee Kotze and Jukka Tyrkkö
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 111] 2023
► pp. 166–193

Chapter 6
From masters and servants to employers and employees

Exploring democratisation with big data

| University of Helsinki
| University of Helsinki

This chapter explores how societal democratisation can be studied by using linguistic big data. More specifically, we are interested in establishing whether it is possible to see how the gradual democratisation of society affected the employment relationship in nineteenth-century Britain by examining changes in the frequency of constructions where different referential terms for both employers and employees were used in the British parliament. We pay particular attention to the gradual waning of the master–servant institution, whose demise can be directly linked to the increased independence of labourers from their employers. We will also briefly explore how data anomalies or outliers can potentially be used as a heuristic when identifying events of historical interest and importance.

Keywords: democratisation, employment, masters, servants, possessive determiners
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Societal and legal developments and the master–servant institution
  • 3.Data and methods
    • 3.1The Hansard Corpus as a source for linguistic analysis
    • 3.2Constructions studied
  • 4.Exploring the employment relationship in the Hansard Corpus
    • 4.1General trends
    • 4.2Masters and servants in the Hansard Corpus
      • 4.2.1Masters in the Hansard Corpus
      • 4.2.2Servants in the Hansard Corpus
    • 4.3Using linguistic outliers to draw attention to historical events
      • 4.3.1The Pains and Penalties Bill of 1820
      • 4.3.2The 1823 slave rebellion in Demerara
  • 5.Discussion and conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 13 November 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.111.06var
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