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Article published In: Corpus studies of language through time: Special issue of the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 27:4 (2022)
Edited by Tony McEnery, Gavin Brookes and Isobelle Clarke
[International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 27:4] 2022
► pp. 480–505

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“In barbarous times and in uncivilized countries”

Two centuries of the evolving uncivil in the Hansard Corpus

ORCiD logo with link | University of Glasgow
ORCiD logo with link | University of Glasgow
Published online: 9 September 2022
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.22016.ale
Abstract
The ways in which politicians have discussed who, what, and where was considered “uncivilized’” across the past two centuries gives an insight into how speakers in a position of authority classified and constructed the world around them, and how those in power in Britain see the country and themselves. This article uses the Hansard Corpus 1803–2003 of speeches in the UK Parliament alongside data from the Historical Thesaurus of English to analyse diachronic variation in usage of words for persons, places and practices considered uncivil. It proposes new methods and offers quantitative data to describe the period’s shift in political attitudes towards not just the so-called “uncivil” but also the country as a whole.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Our data: The Historical Thesaurus and the Hansard Corpus
  • 3.Sense-families and the Uncivil
  • 4.The development of the uncivilized
    • 4.1Types of referents
    • 4.2Sense-families
    • 4.3Foreign and domestic
    • 4.4Past and present
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgments
  • Note
  • References
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