SAMUELS Closing Symposium Huddersfield Project

Lesley Jeffries, Brian Walker and Jane Demmen

Huddersfield Project Aims

1. 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)

2. 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)

3. In the course of carrying out 1 & 2, assist with testing the Hansard Corpus data and the HTST (tagger)

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

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)

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

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

Methods using CQPWeb Hansard (3.1, HT)

Building up the diachronic view of labour relations talk in Hansard

Identifying semantic collocates

1

2

Semantic collocates of 03.11.04.03 and sub-categories

01.12.05.25.04.01-18.04 The world > Space > Relative position > Arrangement/fact of being arranged > State of being gathered together > An assemblage/collection: group: a set of things forming a complex unity

01.13.10-05 

The world > Time > Frequency > rhythm/measure

02.01.13.08.09 

The mind > Mental capacity > Belief > Uncertainty, doubt, hesitation > Possibility

04.01.02 Geographical names (extra HT code for SAMUELS project)

04.03 Grammatical items (extra HT code for SAMUELS project)

NULL (Not recognised by the tagger)

01.11.01.07 

The world > Existence and causation > Existence > State/condition

04.06 Pronouns (extra HT code for SAMUELS project)

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

Collocation of labour relations with 01.11.01.07 State/condition

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).

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

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

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)

ReferencesJeffries, 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).