Cover not available
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. 227–249

Chapter 8
“The job requires considerable expertise”

Tracking experts and expert knowledge in the British parliamentary record (1800–2005)

 | University of Helsinki
While clearly important in decision-making in democratic societies, the authority of science and expertise in public forums is nowadays increasingly challenged by different advocacy groups and crowd-based politics. Using the Hansard Corpus, this chapter explores how experts and expert knowledge are referred to in the British parliamentary record from 1800 to 2005, focusing on how frequently members of parliament (MPs) refer to different kinds of experts and their expertise in parliamentary debates, and whether diachronic changes can be linked to historical events and cultural and intellectual changes. The quantitative analysis is complemented with a qualitative investigation of how experts and expert knowledge are framed in parliamentary debates. The analysis shows that overall the references to experts have increased in the twentieth century and especially after the 1950s. Yet variation among individual terms and discourse contexts is evident, indicating that cultural explanations of corpus data should be approached with caution.
Keywords: expertise, corpus pragmatics, parliamentary debates, Hansard
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Theories of expertise
    • 2.2Expertise and technical decision-making
    • 2.3Kinds of expertise and expert
  • 3.Material and method
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Experts
    • 4.2Expert knowledge
    • 4.3Rhetorical functions of expert terms
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 13 November 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.111.08hil
References (43)
References
Alexander, Marc & Davies, Mark. 2015. The Hansard Corpus 1803–2005. <[URL]> (18 August 2021).
Archer, Dawn. 2017. Mapping Hansard impression management strategies through time and space. Studia Neophilologica 89 (Supplement 1): 5–20. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bazerman, Charles. 1994. Constructing Experience. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.Google Scholar
Blaxill, Luke & Beelen, Kaspar. 2016. A feminized language of democracy? The representation of women at Westminster since 1945. Twentieth Century British History 27(3): 412–449. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bondi, Marina, Cacchiani, Silvia & Mazzi, Davide. 2015. Discourse in and through the media: Recontextualizing and reconceptualizing expert discourse. In Discourse in and through the Media: Recontextualizing and Reconceptualizing Expert Discourse, Marina Bondi, Silvia Cacchiani & Davide Mazzi (eds), 1–20. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.Google Scholar
Boswell, Christina. 2009. The Political Uses of Expert Knowledge: Immigration Policy and Social Research. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brien, Philip & Keep, Matthew. 2018. The public finances: A historical overview. House of Commons Library Briefing Paper, no. 8265.Google Scholar
Brown, Mark B. 2009. Science in Democracy: Expertise, Institutions, and Representation. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Collins, Harry M. 2014. Are We All Scientific Experts Now? Cambridge: Polity.Google Scholar
Collins, Harry M. & Evans, Robert. 2002. The third wave of science studies: Studies of expertise and experience. Social Studies of Science 32(2): 235–296. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2007. Rethinking Expertise. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Conway, Gareth E. & Gore, Julie. 2019. Framing and translating expertise for government. In The Oxford Handbook of Expertise, Paul Ward, Jan Maarten Schraagen, Julie Gore & Emilie M. Roth (eds), 1132–1152. Oxford: OUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Davies, William. 2018. Nervous States: How Feeling Took over the World. London: Jonathan Cape.Google Scholar
Ericsson, K. Anders. 2018. An introduction to the second edition of the Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance: Its development, organization, and content. In The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance (Cambridge Handbooks in Psychology), 2nd ed., K. Anders Ericsson, Robert R. Hoffman, Aaron Kozbelt & A. Williams (eds), 3–20. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Flaherty, Dennis K. 2011. The vaccine-autism connection: A public health crisis caused by unethical medical practices and fraudulent science. Annals of Pharmacotherapy 45(10), 1302–1304. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hiltunen, Turo, Räikkönen, Jenni & Tyrkkö, Jukka. 2020. Investigating colloquialization in the British parliamentary record in the late 19th and early 20th century. In New Perspectives on Democratization: Evidence from English(es), Turo Hiltunen & Lucía Loureiro-Porto (eds). Special issue of Language Sciences 79: 101270. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hird, John A. 2005. Power, Knowledge, and Politics: Policy Analysis in the States. American Governance and Public Policy. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Hoffmann, Sebastian. 2013. Using tag sequences to retrieve grammatical structures. In Research Methods in Language Variation and Change, Manfred Krug & Julia Schlüter (eds), 195–211. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hunston, Susan. 2003. Lexis, wordform and complementation pattern. Functions of Language 10(1): 31–60. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jaffe, Alexandra. 2007. Variability in transcription and the complexities of representation, authority and voice. Discourse Studies 9(6): 831–836. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jockers, Matthew Lee. 2013. Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History. Urbana IL: University of Illinois Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jones, Bill & Norton, Philip. 2014. Politics UK. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Koplenig, Alexander. 2017. The impact of lacking metadata for the measurement of cultural and linguistic change using the Google Ngram data sets: Reconstructing the composition of the German corpus in times of WWII. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 32(1): 169–188. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Larsen, Peder Olesen & von Ins, Markus. 2010. The rate of growth in scientific publication and the decline in coverage provided by Science Citation Index. Scientometrics 84(3): 575–603. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McEnery, Anthony & Baker, Helen. 2016. Corpus Linguistics and 17th-Century Prostitution: Computational Linguistics and History. London: Bloomsbury Academic.Google Scholar
Michel, Jean-Baptiste, Shen, Yuan Kui, Aiden, Aviva Presser, Veres, Adrian, Gray, Matthew K., The Google Books Team, Pickett, Joseph P., Hoiberg, Dale, Clancy, Dan, Norvig, Peter, Orwant, Jon, Pinker, Steven, Nowak, Martin A. & Aiden, Erez Lieberman. 2011. Quantitative analysis of culture using millions of digitized books. Science 331(6014): 176–182. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mollin, Sandra. 2007. The Hansard hazard: Gauging the accuracy of British parliamentary transcripts. Corpora 2(2): 187–210. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Myers, Greg. 1985. Texts as knowledge claims: The social construction of two biology articles. Social Studies of Science 15(4): 593–630. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nichols, Tom. 2017. The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Nutley, Sandra M., Walter, Isabel & Davies, Huw T.O. 2007. Using Evidence: How Research Can Inform Public Services. Bristol: Policy Press.Google Scholar
O’Brien, Timothy L. 2013. Scientific authority in policy contexts: Public attitudes about environmental scientists, medical researchers, and economists. Public Understanding of Science 22(7): 799–816. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pielke, Roger A. 2007. The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Port, M. H. 1990. The official record. Parliamentary History 9(1): 175–183. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Reyes, Antonio. 2011. Strategies of legitimization in political discourse: From words to actions. Discourse & Society 22(6): 781–807. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rühlemann, Christoph & Aijmer, Karin. 2015. Corpus pragmatics: Laying the foundations. In Corpus Pragmatics: A Handbook, Karin Aijmer & Christoph Rühlemann (eds), 1–26. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
Swales, John M. 1990. Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
2004. Research Genres: Explorations and Applications. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tribble, Christopher. 2019. Expert, native or lingua franca? Paradigm choices in novice academic writer support. In Novice Writers and Scholarly Publication: Authors, Mentors, Gatekeepers, Pejman Habibie & Ken Hyland (eds), 53–75. Cham: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Väliverronen, Esa. 2016. Julkinen Tiede (Public Science). Tampere: Vastapaino.Google Scholar
Väliverronen, Esa & Saikkonen, Sampsa. 2020. Freedom of expression challenged: Scientists’ perspectives on hidden forms of suppression and self-censorship. Science, Technology, & Human Values 46(6): 1172–1200. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
van Leeuwen, Theo. 2007. Legitimation in discourse and communication. Discourse & Communication 1(1): 91–112. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ward, Paul, Schraagen, Jan Maarten, Gore, Julie & Roth, Emilie M. 2019. An introduction to the handbook, communities of practice, and definitions of expertise. In The Oxford Handbook of Expertise, Paul Ward, Jan Maarten Schraagen, Julie Gore & Emilie M. Roth (eds). Oxford: OUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Weiss, Carol H. 1979. The many meanings of research utilization. Public Administration Review 39(5): 426–431. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Hiltunen, Turo & Turo Vartiainen
2024. A corpus-pragmatic analysis of linguistic democratisation in the British Hansard. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 25:2 ► pp. 245 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 27 december 2024. 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.