1The tutorial analyses MPs’ speeches during parliamentary sessions. This chapter focuses on certain general characteristics of parliamentary debates since knowing the data well is crucial for developing research questions and interpreting results.
1Parliament is a central political institution. Its institutional nature dictates a clearly defined structure and complex rules of its activities,2 while numerous informal conventions have developed through history, too (Norton, 2002). These rules differ from parliament to parliament, and they change over time (Sieberer et al., 2011). Therefore, they must be known to the researcher(s) for appropriate analysis design and data interpretation. The research also has to consider local and global political contexts, power relations among MPs and their various public and private roles, and the different audiences present at the debate (e.g., other MPs, guests, and the public) (Ilie, 2010).
2Parliamentary sessions follow a clear structure; they have a defined agenda, a designated person leads them, and the floor is passed from one person to another following clear rules (see Proksch and Slapin, 2010). Special rules also apply to specific items on the agenda or the types of debates, e.g., to MPs’ questions and initiatives or interpellations. The structure bears great importance in shaping and limiting parliamentary debates, i.e., the acts of communication in the specific parliamentary environment.
3A part of the broader concept of political discourse, parliamentary discourse is its most institutionalised and formal subtype strictly governed by rules (Bayley, 2004). It is a key characteristic of a parliament, which is the central space for the political debate of a community. Here, not only the contents of the debate matter but also the style of speaking, i.e., the discursive strategies that the speakers use in their speeches, and other, non-linguistic circumstances. Therefore, research of parliamentary activities uses an increasingly interdisciplinary approach to the material, which enables comprehensive interpretation of events and processes of causes and consequences (Bayley, 2004; Ilie, 2010).
1The primary source for the research of parliamentary discourse are the records of parliamentary debates. For most parliaments, they are transcribed and publicly accessible in digital form. Digital form is important both for the public and the research community, yet the actual usefulness of the records depends on the focus of the research (see Mollin, 2007). Much like parliamentary discourse, the records have their particularities which originate from the nature of their source (spoken texts) and from different transcribing traditions of individual parliaments (transcription guidelines differ from parliament to parliament and are generally not made public). As formal written sources, parliamentary records are undoubtedly credible in terms of their content – but not necessarily so when compared to the actual spoken text. The records are not exact transcriptions of the speeches and, therefore, usually lack some or all elements of spoken language (e.g., fillers, false starts) and the information on the non-verbal communication (e.g., interruptions, gestures) (Bayley, 2004). However, they often include additional information or metadata, such as the list of speakers, voting results, the material discussed, etc.
2Parliamentary records in digital form are a convenient source for parliamentary corpora, i.e., structured collections of texts enriched with various data. Parliamentary corpora usually include rich metadata that contains varied information on the session (e.g., date, type, agenda), speeches and speakers (e.g., name, date of birth, party affiliation). They are generally abundant in linguistic annotations (e.g., part of speech, basic word form, named entity). Researchers can use these annotations and metadata to perform various kinds of analyses apart from the simple content analysis of the textual data (see Pančur and Šorn, 2016).
3Due to their rich metadata and continuity, parliamentary corpora are invaluable for various research areas, which have grown increasingly interconnected. They include linguistics (Bayley, 2004), history (Piersma et al., 2014), political science (Rheault and Cochrane, 2020), demographics (Kilroy, 2021), etc. Researchers can access parliamentary corpora through concordancers (i.e., web tools for researching and analysing corpora) or repo sitories of language data resources, which provide access to entire corpora in various formats to be analysed with different tools. The latter option will be chosen for this tutorial (see Chapter 5.2).
1The tutorial will use data from the family of ParlaMint corpora (Erjavec et al., 2021), which contains parliamentary debate records from 17 countries: Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovenia, and Turkey. Most ParlaMint corpora cover the period from 2015 to mid-2020 or more. Designed by the research infrastructure for language resources and technologies CLARIN ERIC, this corpus family contains 500 million words in 5 million speeches produced by around 11 thousand speakers. The ParlaMint corpora are divided into two sub-corpora: Reference (i.e., the reference period) and COVID, which mark the periods before and during the COVID-19 pandemic (i.e., Reference before November 2019; COVID from November 2019 onwards).
2Each national corpus has been encoded following the same scheme based on the Parla-CLARIN encoding recommendations (Erjavec and Pančur, 2019). Common encoding ensures that the national parts of ParlaMint are comparable which makes ParlaMint a valuable resource for comparative and transnational analyses that have so far been difficult to perform. Furthermore, ParlaMint covers a diverse set of European countries, which increases the possibilities of exploring different non-Western parliamentary democracies and acquiring new knowledge about parliamentary systems. This is crucial given that previous research mostly centred around Western countries and especially because comparative research proved very important in improving our understanding of positive and negative parliamentary practices and advancing the development of parliamentary systems (Norton, 2002).
3The tutorial uses the British ParlaMint corpus, ParlaMint-GB, which encompasses the debates from the House of Lords and the House of Commons. The House of Lords currently has 300 members, most of whom are elected, while the rest are appointed. It reviews bills proposed by the House of Commons. The House of Commons consists of 650 elected members and has the primary legislative function. ParlaMint-GB covers four parliamentary terms between January 2015 and March 2021, and holds around 100 million words (Erjavec et al., 2022). The tutorial will use the linguistically annotated version of the corpus 2.1 (Erjavec et al., 2021b), which includes sentence segmentation (the sentences are delimited), tokenization (tokens, numbers and punctuation marks are defined as the basic analytical unit), lemmatisation, morphosyntactic annotations, and named entities (see Chapter 5.3).
2. The key and binding rules of procedure governing parliamentary organisation and work as well as the MPs’ rights and obligations are codified in the rules of procedure of individual parliaments, i.e., the Rules of Procedure of Slovenian National Assembly, the Rules of Procedure of the UK Parliament, the Rules of Procedure of the German Bundestag, etc.