Language Change in British Parliamentary Discourse: A Corpus-Based Study of Power and Authority Markers, 1930-2005

Abstract

From a political perspective, 1928 marks the beginning of a new period in the history of democracy in the U.K., this being when universal full suffrage was achieved via the Representation of the People Act. Taking into consideration this and other social and political factors, the main aim of the present paper is to investigate how the process of democratisation influenced the language employed by Members of Parliament between 1930 and 2005. For this purpose, we examine the use of markers of authority and power. Specifically, the evolution and use of gender-neutral occupational titles are analysed. The corpus used for this investigation is the Hansard Corpus (Alexander and Davies 2022), which includes written records of British parliamentary debates.

Keywords

• democratisation; parliamentary discourse; gender-neutral language; authority; power