Analyzing Language Change in British Parliamentary Discourse: Power and Authority Markers, 1930-2000.

Abstract

In recent literature, one of the processes of language change which has received much attention has been the concept of democratization of discourse (Fairclough 1992: 201, for example), which often falls under the study of critical discourse analysis. This approach can take full advantage of corpus linguistics (Partington & Marchi 2015: 217; Flowerdew 2012: 175), in order to quantitatively analyze how sociocultural changes have an impact on parliamentary discourse. The primary goal of this paper is to assess to what extent and how these changes have been reflected in the language employed by Members of Parliament in Britain. The time framework chosen spans from 1930 to 2000, once universal full suffrage was achieved in 1928 via the Representation of the People Act and the Labour and Conservative parties shared the political power in the United Kingdom.