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Ireland in British parliamentary debates 1803–2005

Plotting changes in discourse in a large volume of time-series corpus data
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Abstract

This study investigates the changing contexts in which the word ireland appears in the The Hansard Corpus of British Parliamentary debates. It combines the use of two statistical techniques for analysis and visualization of historical data (Meaning Fluctuation Analysis and sparklines) with more qualitative examination of concordance lines from the corpus. The full historical context of the patterns observed in the Parliamentary data is also provided. We show that the sophisticated corpus techniques have the ability to draw our attention to important points in the time series, which need to be further investigated within the context of the larger historical picture.

Abstract

This study investigates the changing contexts in which the word ireland appears in the The Hansard Corpus of British Parliamentary debates. It combines the use of two statistical techniques for analysis and visualization of historical data (Meaning Fluctuation Analysis and sparklines) with more qualitative examination of concordance lines from the corpus. The full historical context of the patterns observed in the Parliamentary data is also provided. We show that the sophisticated corpus techniques have the ability to draw our attention to important points in the time series, which need to be further investigated within the context of the larger historical picture.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Acknowledgements vii
  4. The future of historical sociolinguistics? 1
  5. Part I. Methodological innovations
  6. Exploring part-of-speech frequencies in a sociohistorical corpus of English 23
  7. Reading into the past 53
  8. Ireland in British parliamentary debates 1803–2005 83
  9. Discord in eighteenth-century genteel correspondence 109
  10. Part II. New data for historical sociolinguistic research
  11. Competing norms and standards 131
  12. Relativisation in Dutch diaries, private letters and newspapers (1770–1840) 157
  13. “A graphic system which leads its own linguistic life”? 187
  14. Part III. Theory: Bridging gaps, new challenges
  15. Historical sociolinguistics and construction grammar 217
  16. A lost Canadian dialect 239
  17. “Vernacular universals” in nineteenth-century grammar writing 275
  18. Revisiting weak ties 303
  19. Index 327
Exploring Future Paths for Historical Sociolinguistics
This chapter is in the book Exploring Future Paths for Historical Sociolinguistics
https://doi.org/10.1075/ahs.7.04bak

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Acknowledgements vii
  4. The future of historical sociolinguistics? 1
  5. Part I. Methodological innovations
  6. Exploring part-of-speech frequencies in a sociohistorical corpus of English 23
  7. Reading into the past 53
  8. Ireland in British parliamentary debates 1803–2005 83
  9. Discord in eighteenth-century genteel correspondence 109
  10. Part II. New data for historical sociolinguistic research
  11. Competing norms and standards 131
  12. Relativisation in Dutch diaries, private letters and newspapers (1770–1840) 157
  13. “A graphic system which leads its own linguistic life”? 187
  14. Part III. Theory: Bridging gaps, new challenges
  15. Historical sociolinguistics and construction grammar 217
  16. A lost Canadian dialect 239
  17. “Vernacular universals” in nineteenth-century grammar writing 275
  18. Revisiting weak ties 303
  19. Index 327
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