Cover not available
Part of
Doing Politics: Discursivity, performativity and mediation in political discourse
Edited by Michael Kranert and Geraldine Horan
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 80] 2018
► pp. 81–104

Chapter 4
Charting the semantics of labour relations in House of Commons debates spanning two hundred years

A study of parliamentary language using corpus linguistic methods and automated semantic tagging

In this chapter we use new corpus linguistic software tools to investigate the discourse(s) of labour relations in UK House of Commons debates over the 19th and 20th centuries. Our data is from the Hansard Corpus (1803–2005), and benefits from the annotation of meaning and sense categories with the newly-developed Historical Thesaurus Semantic Tagger (Alexander et al. 2015; Piao et al. 2014). Using the bespoke corpus interface CQPweb Hansard, we carry out automated searches for words tagged with relevant semantic category codes. Our quantitative results enable us to chart the semantics of parliamentary discourse on labour relations over time, providing a detailed empirical basis which, we argue, would usefully support further qualitative analysis in linguistic and other research.
Keywords: labour relations, Hansard Corpus, political debate, semantic annotation, tagging
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The HTST and the SAMUELS project
  • 3.The Hansard Corpus
  • 4.Identifying words relating to labour relations using HT semantic categories
  • 5.The semantics of labour relations in House of Commons debates over time
    • 5.1Quantifying labour relations talk in House of Commons debates overall
    • 5.2Semantic categories of labour relations data
    • 5.3The semantics of associations of employers/employees
    • 5.4The semantics of labour relations actions
    • 5.5The semantics of people involved in labour relations
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgement
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 12 December 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.80.04dem
References (32)
References
Ackers, Peter, and Jonathan Payne. 1998. “British Trade Unions and Social Partnership: Rhetoric, Reality and Strategy.” International Journal of Human Resource Management 9 (3): 529–50.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Alexander, Marc, Fraser Dallachy, Scott Piao, Alistair Baron, and Paul Rayson. 2015. “Metaphor, Popular Science and Semantic Tagging: Distant Reading with the Historical Thesaurus of English.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 30 (1): 16–27.Google Scholar
Bennett, Joe. 2013. “Moralising Class: A Discourse Analysis of the Mainstream Political Response to Occupy and the August 2011 British Riots.” Discourse & Society 24 (1): 27–45.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Evert, Stefan. 2009. The CQP Query Language Tutorial. Online version. Accessed 17 February 2017. [URL].
Fairclough, Norman. 2003. Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London: Routledge.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Godard, John. 2014. “The Psychologisation of Employment Relations?” Human Resource Management Journal 24 (1): 1–18.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hamilton, Peter. 2001. “Rhetoric and Employment Relations.” British Journal of Industrial Relations 39 (3): 433–449.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hardie, Andrew. 2012. “CQPweb – Combining Power, Flexibility and Usability in a Corpus Analysis Tool.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 17 (3): 380–409.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hart, Christopher. 2014. Discourse, Grammar and Ideology: Functional and Cognitive Perspectives. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
. 2017. “Metaphor and Intertextuality in Media Framings of the (1984–1985) British Miners’ Strike: A Multimodal Analysis.” Discourse & Communication 11 (1): 3–30.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ilie, Cornelia. 2006. “Parliamentary Discourses.” In Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd edn, ed. by Keith Brown, Vol. 9: 188–97. Oxford: Elsevier.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kay, Christian, Jane Roberts, Michael Samuels, and Irené Wotherspoon (eds). 2014. The Historical Thesaurus of English, Version 4.2. Glasgow: University of Glasgow. Accessed 17 February 2017. [URL]. Originally published as Kay, Christian, Jane Roberts, Michael Samuels, and Irene Wotherspoon (eds). 2009. Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Klebanov, Beata Beigman, Daniel Diermeier, and Eyal Beigman. 2008. “Automatic Annotation of Semantic Fields for Political Science Research.” Journal of Information Technology & Politics 5 (1): 95–120.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Language Unlocked. 2012. 20 Years of Unions21: Union Identity in Print Media. Report to Unions21, Stylistics Research Centre, University of Huddersfield, UK. Unions21 report no longer available online
Laybourn, Keith. 1992. A History of British Trade Unionism c. 1770–1990. Stroud: Alan Sutton.Google Scholar
. 1993. The General Strike of 1926. Manchester: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
Mollin, Sandra. 2009. “‘I Entirely Understand’ is a Blairism. The Methodology of Identifying Idiolectal Collocations.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 14 (3): 367–92.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2007. “The Hansard Hazard: Gauging the Accuracy of British Parliamentary Transcripts.” Corpora 2 (2): 187–210.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
The Oxford English Dictionary. 2015. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Accessed 17 February 2017. [URL].
Piao, Scott, Fraser Dallachy, Alistair Baron, Jane Demmen, Steve Wattam, Paul Rayson, and Marc Alexander. 2017. “A Time-sensitive Historical Thesaurus-based Semantic Tagger for Deep Semantic Annotation.” Computer Speech and Language 46: 113–135.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Piao, Scott, Fraser Dallachy, Alistair Baron, Paul Rayson, and Marc Alexander. 2014. “Developing the Historical Thesaurus Semantic Tagger.” Digital Humanities Congress 2014, 4–6 September 2014, Sheffield, UK. Digital Humanities Congress 2014 paper no longer available online
Rayson, Paul. 2008. “From Key Words to Key Semantic Domains.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 13 (4): 519–549.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rayson, Paul, Dawn Archer, Scott Piao, and Tony McEnery. 2004a. “The UCREL Semantic Analysis System.” In proceedings of the workshop on Beyond Named Entity Recognition Semantic Labelling for NLP Tasks In Association With LREC 2004, Lisbon, Portugal, 7–12. Accessed17 February 2017. [URL].
Rayson, Paul, Damon Berridge, and Brian Francis. 2004b. “Extending the Cochran Rule for the Comparison of Word Frequencies Between Corpora.” In Le Poids des Mots: Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Statistical Analysis of Textual Data (JADT 2004) ed. by Gérald Purnelle, Cédrick Fairon, and Anne Dister. Vol. 2: 926–936. Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium: Presses Universitaires de Louvain.Google Scholar
Sealey, Alison, and Stephen Bates. 2016. “Prime Ministerial Self-Reported Actions in Prime Minister’s Questions 1979–2010. A Corpus-Assisted Analysis.” Journal of Pragmatics 104: 18–31.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Shaw, Sylvia. 2000. “Language, Gender and Floor Apportionment in Political Debates.” Discourse & Society 11 (3): 401–18.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2015. “Off the Record: Language, Data and Parliamentary Debates.” Paper presented at the conference Political Discourse: Multidisciplinary Approaches, University College London, UK, 26–27 June 2015.
. 2018. “Off the record: The transcription of parliamentary debates for political discourse analysis.” In Doing Politics. Discursivity, Performativity and Mediation in Political Discourse. 105-126. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Shepherd, John. 2015. Crisis? What Crisis? The Callaghan Government and the British ‘Winter of Discontent’. Manchester: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
Syrett, Keith. 1998. “‘Immunity’, ‘Privilege’, and ‘Right’: British Trade Unions and the Language of Labour Law Reform.” Journal of Law and Society 25 (3): 388–406.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Toolan, Michael. 2016. “Peter Black, Christopher Stevens, class and inequality in the Daily Mail.” Discourse & Society, 27 (6): 642–660.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wrigley, Chris. 1997. British Trade Unions 1945–1995. Manchester: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
Cited by (3)

Cited by three other publications

Jeffries, Lesley, Fransina Stradling, Alex von Lünen & Hugo Sanjurjo-González
2023. Hansard at Huddersfield. In Exploring Language and Society with Big Data [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 111], ► pp. 89 ff. DOI logo
Kettunen, Kimmo & Matti La Mela
2021. Semantic tagging and the Nordic tradition of everyman’s rights. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities DOI logo
Fišer, Darja & Kristina Pahor de Maiti
2020. Voices of the Parliament. Modern Languages Open 1 DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 3 january 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.