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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. 336–372

Chapter 12
Colloquialisation, compression and democratisation in British parliamentary debates

 | University of Zurich
 | University of Lausanne
We conduct an analysis of the link between colloquialisation and democratisation in debates in the British parliament. Our corpus is a sampler of the Hansard archive, covering the period 1803–2005 and containing 170 million words. We first investigate how the linguistic patterns of parliamentary debates have evolved, and second how the content of the debates has changed over time. Combining these two research questions allows us to step to a third question: are there direct relations between linguistic features, most notably colloquialisation and compression of language, and the topical content of parliamentary discourse, particularly its underpinnings in social and political democratisation processes? We also critically discuss strong correlations between features of language complexity and democracy indices. We adopt an interdisciplinary perspective embedded in both linguistics and political sciences.
Keywords: colloquialisation, compression, democratisation, topic modelling, language change, language and society, culturonomics, Digital Humanities
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Colloquialisation and democratisation
    • 1.2The use of records of parliamentary debates to study democratisation
    • 1.3Changes in linguistic patterns of parliamentary debates
    • 1.4Changes in the content of parliamentary debates
  • 2.Data and methods of analysis
    • 2.1Data
    • 2.2Methods
      • 2.2.1Individual linguistic features
      • 2.2.2Correlation with indices of democracy and economy
      • 2.2.3Topic modelling
      • 2.2.4Relationship between linguistic and content changes
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Linguistic change across time
    • 3.2Linguistic difference between the two chambers
    • 3.3Correlation of linguistic features with external indices
    • 3.4Change in content
    • 3.5Linking linguistic and content change
  • 4.Discussion and limitations of our study
    • 4.1Main findings
    • 4.2Limitations
    • 4.3Outlook
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 13 November 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.111.12sch
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