In:Exploring Language and Society with Big Data: Parliamentary discourse across time and space
Edited by Minna Korhonen, Haidee Kotze and Jukka Tyrkkö
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 111] 2023
► pp. 54–88
Chapter 2Salient differences between Australian oral parliamentary discourse and its official written records
A comparison of ‘close’ and ‘distant’ analysis methods
Published online: 13 November 2023
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.111.02kot
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.111.02kot
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.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.The ‘Hansard hazard’
- 3.Methodology
- 3.1Corpus
- 3.2‘Close reading’ methodology
- 3.3‘Distant reading’ methodology
- 4.Findings
- 4.1‘Close reading’ results
- 4.1.1Pronouns
- 4.1.2Discourse markers
- 4.1.3Modals
- 4.2‘Distant reading’ results
- 4.2.1Dimension score analysis
- 4.2.2Analysis of individual features
- 4.1‘Close reading’ results
- 5.Discussion and conclusion
Notes References
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Cited by (1)
Cited by one other publication
Kajzer-Wietrzny, Marta
2022. An intermodal approach to cohesion in constrained and unconstrained language. Target. International Journal of Translation Studies 34:1 ► pp. 130 ff.
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