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SAMUELS Closing Symposium Huddersfield Project

This project aims to examine the language used to discuss labour relations and trades unions in parliamentary debates over time. It builds on previous research into union representation in the British press and analyzes semantic collocates to gain a deeper understanding. The project utilizes the Hansard Corpus data and HTST (tagger) to analyze lexical items and diachronic periods. The research began in 2014 and is ongoing.

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SAMUELS Closing Symposium Huddersfield Project

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  1. SAMUELS Closing Symposium Huddersfield Project Lesley Jeffries, Brian Walker and Jane Demmen

  2. Huddersfield Project Aims • Investigate language used to talk about labour relations, particularly trades unions, across time in parliamentary language • project title: Is there a Baron in the Commons? • builds on previous work into the way unions & their leaders are discussed in the British press (Language Unlocked 2012) • Include the analysis of semantic collocates • builds on previous work into lexical collocates of keywords in the British press when Tony Blair was UK prime minister (Jeffries & Walker 2012) • In the course of carrying out 1 & 2, assist with testing the Hansard Corpus data and the HTST (tagger)

  3. Progress and interim findings • Data needed to meet aims 1 & 2: • frequency counts of lexical items concerning labour relations from Hansard, HT-tagged • broken down by diachronic periods • semantic collocates enabled • Background research/lit review till Jan 2015 • Corpus querying began early Feb with CQPWeb Hansard V3.0 • Currently working with V3.1 to overcome some technical problems and access full data

  4. Initial data and methods • Preliminary analysis of Callaghan/Thatcher data extract began September 2014 • Testing of lexical searches and USAS (Rayson et al 2004) semantic domains to find language used around unions/labour relations • Prototypical items (strike, union) mainly in • I3.1 Work and employment: Generally • G1.2 Politics • Broad categories which would require a lot of manual screening • Diverted to analysis of formulaic language(in progress)

  5. Advantages of using HT tags for this study • HT offers more specific categories, so should enable a more nuanced analysis with less need for manual filtering of irrelevant items • HT overarching structure: 03 (Society) -> 03.11 (Occupation and work) -> 03.11.04 (working) • 82 HT sub-categories relating to labour relations

  6. HT categories relating to labour relations • 03.11.04.03 (Labour relations)-> 24 subcategories • 03.11.04.04 (Association of employers/employees)-> 32 subcategories • 03.11.09.05 (Those involved in labour relations/associations)-> 23 subcategories

  7. Methods using CQPWeb Hansard (3.1, HT)

  8. Building up the diachronic view of labour relations talk in Hansard

  9. Identifying semantic collocates

  10. 1 2

  11. Semantic collocates of 03.11.04.03 and sub-categories

  12. Collocation of labour relations with 01.12.05.25.04.01-18.04 An assemblage/collection: group: a set of things forming a complex unity 1 word at this level: system

  13. Collocation of labour relations with 01.11.01.07 State/condition

  14. Interim findings and progress to date • Some cases of measure (as a collocate) are tagged incorrectly. • According to the online HT, conciliation does not have a meaning association with labour relations until 1876. • We may find evidence of earlier cases, but, as with striking, we know some cases of conciliation are not tagged correctly. • These would need manual filtering (conciliation was the most frequently-occurring item when the Labour Relations HT code was queried).

  15. Interim findings and progress to date • We hope to provide some feedback on accuracy of the tagging, once we can get data for all decades • The larger decades have proved problematic in processing, so we are trying to create subcorpora (rather than use the Restricted Query form) to see if this works better • We hope to complete the analysis in due course, for conferences and publications

  16. Outputs: Conference papers • Abstracts accepted for: • The 13th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference (ICLC-13), 20-25 July 2015, Northumbria University, Newcastle • Poetics and Linguistic Association Conference (PALA), 15-18 July 2015, University of Kent, Canterbury • Abstract submitted for: • Political Discourse: Multidisciplinary Approaches, 26-27 June 2015, University College London

  17. Outputs: Publications • Language styles at the dispatch box: comparing the language used by two former UK Prime Ministers (in preparation; proposed submission for the Journal of Language & Politics) • “Is there a Baron in the Commons?” An investigation of the way industrial unions and their leaders are discussed in the UK House of Commons (details to be decided once data retrieved and analysis under way) • A diachronic study of language used to talk about labour relations in UK House of Commons debates 1803-2005 (details to be decided once data retrieved and analysis under way)

  18. References Jeffries, L. and Walker, B. (2012) “Key words in the press”. English Text Construction 5(2): 208-29. Language Unlocked (2012) 20 years of Unions21: Union identity in print media. Report to Unions21, Stylistics Research Centre, University of Huddersfield. See https://www.hud.ac.uk/media/universityofhuddersfield/content/image/research/mhm/stylisticsresearchcentre/Unions21report12062013.pdf Rayson, P. (2008) From key words to key semantic domains. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 13(4), 519-549. Rayson, P., Archer, D., Piao, S. & McEnery, T. (2004). The UCREL semantic analysis system. In Proceedings of the workshop on Beyond Named Entity Recognition Semantic labelling for NLP tasks in association with the 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2004), Lisbon, Portugal, 25 May 2004 (pp. 7-12). See http://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/1783/1/usas_lrec04ws.pdf (last accessed March 2015).

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