Writing in his chapter, Marc Alexander quotes the Hon. Charles Hanbury-Tracy commenting on the process of parliamentary debate record keeping in the 1870s: ‘Mr. Hansard has conducted his difficult work during this long number of years [but] this system gives rise to a great deal of inconvenience’ (Alexander, ‘Speech in the British Hansard’, p. 33). This type of difficult work, often created with a great deal of inconvenience for all involved, is the subject of the book edited by Minna Korhonen, Haidee Kotze and Jukka Tyrkkö (henceforth, KK&T). Bringing together a variety of scholars, KK&T have produced a volume that allows us to focus on parliamentary recordings as a source of proof of linguistic, social and political change over time. The work benefits from wide-ranging scholarship that embraces novel and innovative techniques, that covers broad periods of time with confidence and clarity, and that provides specific detailed analysis to underpin the arguments laid out.
KK&T state that this type of study highlights ‘the significant contribution that linguistic perspectives can bring to understanding the world around us’ (Tyrkkö & Kotze, ‘Perspectives on parliamentary discourse’, p. 1) and combine it with ‘[p]arliamentary language [which] has been a topic of great interest for scholars from a wide variety of disciplines’ (p. 4). In so doing, KK&T harness the combined powers of big data, close reading, distant reading and mixed methods analyses to unpick the linguistic, political and social trends in parliaments from across the globe (but with a greater focus on the British parliament and the British Hansard records).
The work ranges in scope from a history of reporting the speeches of the British and the Australian parliaments, through specific analyses of particular concepts, ideas and speech patterns within the British parliament (notably, race, UK–EU relations, mental health, expertise, colloquialisms) to broader analyses of comparisons between the British and the Australian parliaments’ recording of language change. KK&T also include non-Anglophone, non-Westminster systems by incorporating analyses of parliamentary speech in Suriname and in the Spanish parliament. The major focus of the work is, however, undeniably the British parliament and the records contained within the British Hansard.
Arguably, the work’s greatest strength is in the scope of coverage of the British parliament’s debates. Within the chapters covering Britain, we see a convergence of big data and close readings that provide hitherto inaccessible accounts and analysis of the nation’s governing institution. Taken collectively, the works on the British parliament included here will form the backbone of all future linguistic research into British political speech. This is no small achievement; the research conducted here brings together such scope of linguistic analysis as to be groundbreaking in its study of Westminster.
On the other hand, while the works not on Westminster are well conducted and thorough, they feel a little out of place within the book. The discussion of the Australian parliament is more sensibly aligned to the rest of the work given the historical traditions of Australia and Britain, the similarities of political systems and parliamentary procedures between the countries, and the cultural/political/social ties between Australia and the United Kingdom. Robert Borges and Margot van den Berg’s chapter on Suriname (‘Language variation in parliamentary speech in Suriname’) and Cristinia Lastres-López’s chapter on Spain (‘Morphosyntactic and pragmatic variation in conditional constructions in English and Spanish parliamentary discourse’) are perhaps somewhat disconnected from the main body of the work – and their location towards the end of the book unfortunately emphasises the perhaps ‘afterthought’ nature of their inclusion. While I am sure that these chapters were not in themselves an afterthought, they do sit a little awkwardly in a book so dedicated to the analysis of Westminster and Hansard.
Turning to the individual chapters within the volume, we begin with Marc Alexander’s ‘Speech in the British Hansard’ (pp. 17–53). Alexander’s role in this lengthy work is part historian, part detective, part linguist and part Hansard biographer. This combination provides us with a chapter that sets the scene for the rest of the book to follow: Alexander, through thorough and detailed analysis of recording patterns and policies over two hundred years, provides the reader with an intricate understanding of how and why Hansard works.
Littered with choice quotes that illuminate the point, Alexander’s chapter details the changing nature of parliamentary recording within the British parliament. The combination of big data (1.6 billion words in total [p. 18] with, as an example, 2,855,357 words and 4,257 contributions in the House of Commons alone for the year 1843 [p. 33]) and specific example allows Alexander to provide a coherent argument for the different types of recording of speech we see over time in Hansard (p. 28). Alexander’s contribution here is to lay out the types of speech reporting through the various time periods, as well as changes in recording and editing policies (and companies and peoples) (p. 49), but to also highlight to the researcher a number of the challenges with the data. This work will prove an essential reference for scholars working with Hansard in any capacity.
Continuing the theme of close reading with big data, distant analysis, Haidee Kotze, Minna Korhonen, Adam Smith and Bertus van Rooy’s ‘Salient differences between Australian oral parliamentary discourse and its official written records’ provides an in-depth analysis of the variation between recordings and transcripts in the Australian parliament (pp. 54–88). Kotze et al.’s chapter is a case study exemplar in attention to meticulous detail, scholarly investigation that is time-consuming and labour-intensive, and solid discussion of findings. Highly aware of the ‘Hansard hazard’ (Mollin Reference Mollin2007), Kotze et al. (p. 55) highlight key differences between the audio transcripts and the Hansard records (e.g. p. 65). This investigation allows Kotze et al. space to investigate in detail the editorial procedures and processes in the Australian Hansard, to unpick the ‘Hansard hazard’ concept with meaningful examples, and to really highlight the benefits of close reading as part of the toolkit alongside distant analysis for the researcher. Their achievement is to showcase that Hansard does ‘give the speakers what they say’ (Hansard Reference Hansard2008: 25, quoted on p. 79) and that Hansard may not be so much of a ‘hazard’ for linguists. Kotze et al.’s work provides proof of the increasing reliability of the Australian Hansard over time; their chapter provides us with ‘a useful antidote to qualitative approaches that are intent on finding differences’ by providing ‘contextualise[d] differences that are observed against the backdrop of overarching similarity’ (pp. 86–7).
Chapter 3, ‘Hansard at Huddersfield’ introduces us to the work of building a user-friendly corpus (pp. 89–117). In this chapter, Lesley Jeffries, Fransina Stradling, Alexander von Lünen and Hugo Sanjurjo-González provide an account of their preparation of data with some examples of usage. Unfortunately, the first section of their chapter has already been extensively covered – with more detail – by Alexander and by Kotze et al. before them; as a result, a lot of the set-up reads as repetition and is redundant. As a political historian myself, I found it a surprise to be informed that my subject area is not used to dealing with corpora and large bodies of text (p. 95) or that political scientists do not understand the nuance of linguistic change/choice.
The examples chosen by Jeffries et al. are interesting and enlightening, but might be best pitched at A-Level or first-year university student. This is not inherently a flaw – the authors have aimed to engage the public with their website – but beyond some colourful outputs there seems to be little significant contribution to our understanding of the language of Westminster. The chapter sits uncomfortably between a research paper and a public engagement piece. If the former, there needed to be greater engagement with the literature around the topic to articulate the research space and niche more clearly. If the latter, the format of a traditional research paper is perhaps not ideal.
Christian Mair’s ‘Empire, migration and race in the British parliament (1803–2005)’, the fourth chapter (pp. 118–41), begins the focus and analysis of specific elements of political speech that follow in later chapters. While Mair establishes himself as ‘not a historian’ (p. 121), his work here clearly engages with key themes in historical and political study, as well as linguistics. The utilisation of a combination of large data and close reading, with a variety of well-chosen, informative quotes from the sources, allows Mair to prove with clarity the linguistic changes over time for the controversial topic of empire and race. The specific examples discussed in Mair are interesting and useful guides to showcase the benefits of the approach taken. The discussion of Enoch Powell (pp. 136–9) is cited as an example of comparison with Anthony Benn, but it does not function exactly as such. There is only one quote from Benn and much more attention is given to Powell. Mair’s comparison between Gladstone and Disraeli is a better example of drawing together opposing political sides for investigation.
With the focus of case studies of topics continuing, Jenni Räikkönen’s ‘Leaving the EU out of the ingroup: A diachronic analysis of the use of we and us in British parliamentary debates (1973–2015)’ provides a specific account of a shifting pattern of inclusive-of-EU speech with first-personal plural pronouns (pp. 142–65). Räikkönen’s work highlights the strength of this in-depth investigation of a topic: a variety of choices of data, clear presentation of results and findings in informative graphs and charts, and a narrative that brings the reader to an inevitable outcome are the strengths of this chapter. Räikkönen excluded use of acronyms (e.g. EC or EU) in the analysis. While there is a plausible defence of the choice, the exclusion does leave the reader to wonder a little if there are different political outlooks – thereby affecting speech patterns – in choice of full name versus acronym. This is a topic worthy of further research.
Chapter 6 (pp. 166–93), Turo Vartianinen and Minna Palander-Collin’s ‘From masters and servants to employers and employees: Exploring democratisation with big data’ uses a big data approach to track a shift in the culture and language around employment in Britain. Vartianinen and Palander-Collin’s research highlights the ways in which a common-sense hypothesis can be undone by big data: the linguistic patterns in Hansard do not show expected big swells of change or discussion of their concept around the dates of legal change (pp. 168, 175). The use of big data in this chapter, however, has allowed the authors to trace with authority a significant shift in the political language around employment, and to highlight unexpected patterns that will require further historical investigation (e.g. the drop in the use of servant being not a watershed moment after the horrors and upheavals of World War I, but a gradual process beginning almost a century earlier, p. 190).
This analysis of changing linguistic patterns and social attitudes is furthered in Minna Nevala and Jukka Tyrkkö’s chapter, ‘From criminal lunacy to mental disorder: The changing lexis of mental health in the British parliament’ (pp. 194–226). Nevala and Tyrkkö merge data from the Historical Thesaurus of English (hereafter, HTE) categories with Hansard to investigate all lexical terms available to political speakers in Hansard. This combination allows the authors to provide a staggering array of data, examples and specific highlights throughout the chapter. The reader is left with a clear sense of the shift in societal attitudes and linguistic uses, and Nevala and Tyrkkö draw sensible conclusions, illuminating comparisons and clear highlights from the data. Their statement that ‘large-scale analyses of culturally important textual data sets’ allow the researcher to trace change and co-occurrence often difficult to ‘identify from small samples of the close reading of individual texts’ (p. 222) is an understatement of the value of this type of analysis and its contribution to our linguistic, political and societal understanding.
The final chapter in the run of investigations into particular topics in the British parliament is Turo Hiltunen’s ‘“The job requires considerable expertise”: Tracking experts and expert knowledge in the British parliamentary record (1800–2005)’ (pp. 227–49). This chapter requires some more scene-setting: the author does well to establish what he means by ‘expert’ and ‘expert knowledge’ as a basis for their methodology. This clarification has allowed for a focused methodology that, like chapter 6 before it, adopts the HTE semantic categories as a basis to interpret the Hansard data. The examples cited are fascinating – scholars and philosophers do not do well throughout the twentieth century, unfortunately – while consultants and scientists increase their presence in the language used. The author couches their big data findings within sensible, well-founded limitations.
Chapters 6 and 7 taken together are strong examples of the ways in which the HTE and Hansard data can be used to investigate changing conceptions, language use, societal patterns and political speech over time. The case studies here provide exemplars of the ways in which big data, combined with nuanced investigation and detailed analysis, produce novel, interesting, unexpected and fascinating results for the linguist, the historian and the political scientist.
‘Processing and prescriptivism as constraints on language variation and change: Relative clauses in British and Australian English parliamentary debates’, by Sofie Labat, Haidee Kotze and Benedikt Szmrecsanyi, returns the focus to the Australian Hansard in a comparison between British and Australian political speech patterns (pp. 250–76). The Australian Hansard is used to highlight an example of linguistic evolution of postcolonial English in Australia. The authors, noting the discussion of the relative accuracy of the Australian Hansard from Kotze et al. in chapter 2 as well as some of the limitations of (especially older) records in the British Hansard detailed in Alexander’s chapter 1, take care to highlight that their discussion uses Hansard not ‘as a verbatim record’ as such, but as ‘reconstructions of speech, and specifically reconstructions in which various agents have participated’ (p. 259). The authors here are able to highlight clear patterns of change in both the British and Australian use of which versus that. While Australia sees a gradual shift towards which, following American English usage perhaps, the British Hansard sees a distinct, marked change (which may be down to editorial decisions as well as shifting language use). This chapter in particular usefully highlights the impact of editorial decisions on our ability to utilise with certainty the data drawn from Hansard, and this argument is clearly articulated throughout.
As pointed out above, Borges and van den Berg’s chapter marks a shift away from Hansard-style recordings and instead focuses on the building of a corpus of speech from the Suriname parliament, De National Assemblée (hereafter, DNA) (pp. 277–307). The authors used the DNA’s YouTube channel to scrape videos of parliamentary speech before using an automated transcription process to convert the speeches to text. Unfortunately, the authors themselves note that it is not entirely possible to be aware of the overall accuracy of this approach (p. 287). Nonetheless, their analysis provides a clear account of linguistic use choice between Surinamese Dutch and Netherlandic Dutch. As in chapter 6, the authors have found the common-sense answer to be undone by big data: the assumption that Surinamese Dutch would be used more than Netherlandic Dutch does not hold true in the data collected (p. 302). The approach adopted here is a novel, interesting account of dealing with parliamentary records for systems not employing the Anglophone Hansard pattern.
Lastres-López presents the second chapter to include a language other than English in her comparison between Hansard’s recordings and the Spanish parliament’s Diario de Sesiones del Congreso de los Diputados (Journals of the Sittings of the Spanish Parliament) (pp. 308–35). Lastres-López highlights the unusual nature – in European parliamentary terms – of the ‘debate’ structure of Westminster, where the government is fought with rhetoric and political confrontations (p. 309). With this difference established, the author uses in-depth analysis and comparisons between the two parliaments to unpack the use of conditionals; splitting them into their different use types across two languages and two parliaments, and categorising the differences, is no mean task. Lastres-López handles the wealth of data with comfort and ease, and draws conclusions that highlight some interesting similarities (Spanish and English politicians both have lower frequency of interpersonal conditionals in their speeches than in general day-to-day conversation) and differences (Spanish political speech is closer to normal speech than can be found in Westminster). This chapter highlights the strength of cross-linguistic research to better understand societal, cultural and linguistic difference.
The final chapter returns to a focus on Hansard and the British parliament (pp. 336–72). Gerold Schneider and Maud Reveilhac’s ‘Colloquialisation, compression and democratisation in British parliamentary debates’ continues the theme from chapter 6 of using speeches in Westminster as a way of tracking the significant societal shifts towards democratisation over the last two hundred years. The authors argue, I think convincingly, that the linguistic changes seen in parliament (the removal of discourse asymmetries, the reductions of linguistic markers of social distance, the accessibility of content and language, and so on) overlap with the political science conceptions of democratisation (through, amongst others, colloquialisation, audience-centred content, democratic political rules, and so on).
The authors track a variety of changes in the language and political discussions of Hansard: contractions and shorter sentence lengths, topic choices over time that focus on self-fulfilment and markers of democratic societies, and increasingly educated, technical language showing a well-educated population. The authors note, albeit briefly, the challenges of the edited nature of the Hansard records. Nonetheless, this chapter serves as an exemplar of interdisciplinary research that brings the linguistic records to the political sciences in order to produce a data-driven, nuanced understanding of political and linguistic change over time.
Taken as a sum total, the volume edited here by KK&T is an impressive collection that provides us with one of the most in-depth investigations into the speeches of the British parliament especially. As mentioned above, the inclusion of non-Hansard systems sits a little oddly in a text so devoted to Hansard, but that should not undermine either the quality of the work in those chapters or the intent on the part of the editors to include non-Anglophone examples.
This work should form the bedrock of future research into parliamentary speech, the linguistic history of British politics, and the utilisation of big data and close reading techniques to produce novel, fascinating research.
