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Part of
Corpus-based Research on Variation in English Legal Discourse
Edited by Teresa Fanego and Paula Rodríguez-Puente
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 91] 2019
► pp. 235–260

Chapter 10
The representation of citizens and monarchy in Acts of Parliament in 1800 to 2000

Identifying social roles through collocations

| University of Helsinki

This chapter considers the representation of citizens and the British monarchy in Acts of Parliament from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the Corpus of Late Modern English Statutes. The analysis investigates collocates associated with those two social groups and traces their semantic preferences and semantic prosodies. The portrayals of the groups are related to developments in the socio-historical context and legislation. The study suggests that the acts form notably dissimilar representations of the monarchy and citizens. The Crown is generally addressed in a respectful manner. The role of the citizens, by contrast, improves considerably in the data: the nineteenth-century acts focus on the criminal actions of the citizens, while their rights are emphasised in the following century.

Keywords: collocation, representation, Acts of Parliament, Late Modern English, historical pragmatics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Representation of social groups and earlier studies
  • 3.Collocation analysis
  • 4.Genre studies and historical pragmatics
  • 5.Data: Corpus of Late Modern English Statutes
  • 6.Method of analysis
  • 7.Overview of the frequencies of different social groups
  • 8.The representation of the citizens: Person
  • 9.The representation of the monarchy
  • 10.Discussion and conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 February 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.91.10leh
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