Chapter 2. Salient differences between Australian oral parliamentary discourse and its official written records
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Haidee Kotze
Abstract
This chapter addresses the question of editorial practice for the Australian Hansard with the use of an aligned corpus of transcribed audio recordings and the corresponding Hansard records, covering the period 1946–2015. A more traditional, qualitative, bottom-up approach is taken by manually analysing the data to compile a list of differences in the two types of records. In addition, a deductive, quantitative approach is adopted by using the multidimensional analysis method of Biber (1988) to identify significant differences in the frequencies of (clusters of) features between the oral transcripts and written Hansard records and interpret these. Our primary aim is to provide insight into methodological questions associated with working with big linguistic data. Alongside this, we report findings about differences between the written Hansard and the original speeches: reduction of spoken language processing features and informality, greater conservatism, and more density – although these differences decrease over time.
Abstract
This chapter addresses the question of editorial practice for the Australian Hansard with the use of an aligned corpus of transcribed audio recordings and the corresponding Hansard records, covering the period 1946–2015. A more traditional, qualitative, bottom-up approach is taken by manually analysing the data to compile a list of differences in the two types of records. In addition, a deductive, quantitative approach is adopted by using the multidimensional analysis method of Biber (1988) to identify significant differences in the frequencies of (clusters of) features between the oral transcripts and written Hansard records and interpret these. Our primary aim is to provide insight into methodological questions associated with working with big linguistic data. Alongside this, we report findings about differences between the written Hansard and the original speeches: reduction of spoken language processing features and informality, greater conservatism, and more density – although these differences decrease over time.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Perspectives on parliamentary discourse 1
- Chapter 1. Speech in the British Hansard 17
- Chapter 2. Salient differences between Australian oral parliamentary discourse and its official written records 54
- Chapter 3. Hansard at Huddersfield 89
- Chapter 4. Empire, migration and race in the British parliament (1803–2005) 118
- Chapter 5. Leaving the EU out of the ingroup 142
- Chapter 6. From masters and servants to employers and employees 166
- Chapter 7. From criminal lunacy to mental disorder 194
- Chapter 8. “The job requires considerable expertise” 227
- Chapter 9. Processing and prescriptivism as constraints on language variation and change 250
- Chapter 10. Language variation in parliamentary speech in Suriname 277
- Chapter 11. Morphosyntactic and pragmatic variation in conditional constructions in English and Spanish parliamentary discourse 308
- Chapter 12. Colloquialisation, compression and democratisation in British parliamentary debates 336
- Index 373
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Perspectives on parliamentary discourse 1
- Chapter 1. Speech in the British Hansard 17
- Chapter 2. Salient differences between Australian oral parliamentary discourse and its official written records 54
- Chapter 3. Hansard at Huddersfield 89
- Chapter 4. Empire, migration and race in the British parliament (1803–2005) 118
- Chapter 5. Leaving the EU out of the ingroup 142
- Chapter 6. From masters and servants to employers and employees 166
- Chapter 7. From criminal lunacy to mental disorder 194
- Chapter 8. “The job requires considerable expertise” 227
- Chapter 9. Processing and prescriptivism as constraints on language variation and change 250
- Chapter 10. Language variation in parliamentary speech in Suriname 277
- Chapter 11. Morphosyntactic and pragmatic variation in conditional constructions in English and Spanish parliamentary discourse 308
- Chapter 12. Colloquialisation, compression and democratisation in British parliamentary debates 336
- Index 373
