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Chapter 8. “The job requires considerable expertise”

Tracking experts and expert knowledge in the British parliamentary record (1800–2005)
  • Turo Hiltunen
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Exploring Language and Society with Big Data
This chapter is in the book Exploring Language and Society with Big Data

Abstract

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.

Abstract

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.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Perspectives on parliamentary discourse 1
  4. Chapter 1. Speech in the British Hansard 17
  5. Chapter 2. Salient differences between Australian oral parliamentary discourse and its official written records 54
  6. Chapter 3. Hansard at Huddersfield 89
  7. Chapter 4. Empire, migration and race in the British parliament (1803–2005) 118
  8. Chapter 5. Leaving the EU out of the ingroup 142
  9. Chapter 6. From masters and servants to  employers  and employees 166
  10. Chapter 7. From criminal lunacy to mental disorder 194
  11. Chapter 8. “The job requires considerable expertise” 227
  12. Chapter 9. Processing and prescriptivism as constraints on language variation and change 250
  13. Chapter 10. Language variation in parliamentary speech in Suriname 277
  14. Chapter 11. Morphosyntactic and pragmatic variation in conditional constructions in English and Spanish parliamentary discourse 308
  15. Chapter 12. Colloquialisation, compression and democratisation in British parliamentary debates 336
  16. Index 373
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.111.08hil

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Perspectives on parliamentary discourse 1
  4. Chapter 1. Speech in the British Hansard 17
  5. Chapter 2. Salient differences between Australian oral parliamentary discourse and its official written records 54
  6. Chapter 3. Hansard at Huddersfield 89
  7. Chapter 4. Empire, migration and race in the British parliament (1803–2005) 118
  8. Chapter 5. Leaving the EU out of the ingroup 142
  9. Chapter 6. From masters and servants to  employers  and employees 166
  10. Chapter 7. From criminal lunacy to mental disorder 194
  11. Chapter 8. “The job requires considerable expertise” 227
  12. Chapter 9. Processing and prescriptivism as constraints on language variation and change 250
  13. Chapter 10. Language variation in parliamentary speech in Suriname 277
  14. Chapter 11. Morphosyntactic and pragmatic variation in conditional constructions in English and Spanish parliamentary discourse 308
  15. Chapter 12. Colloquialisation, compression and democratisation in British parliamentary debates 336
  16. Index 373
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