1Parliaments represent the main fora for political debate that shapes legislation which directly impacts our everyday lives. Parliamentary discourse is motivated by a wide range of communicative roles and reveals patterns of political agendas, ideological stances and institutional roles of members of parliament who represent the interests of citizens (Ilie, 2017). This is also why parliaments have always been of interest to scholars from a range of disciplines in the humanities and social science.

2Parliamentary proceedings are being increasingly made available in a digitized form, and turned into structured linguistic resources called corpora for many European languages. These are often available online and can be queried through dedicated tools called concordancers. Researchers use these to perform diverse linguistic, stylistic, cultural, societal and political studies (Biel et al., 2018; Jaworska and Ryan, 2018).

3While corpus methods are widely used in linguistics (Biber and Reppen, 2015; McEnery and Hardie, 2011), including gender analysis (Baker, 2014), this tutorial shows the potential of richly annotated language corpora for research of the socio-cultural context and changes over time that are reflected through language use. The tutorial encourages students and scholars of modern languages, as well as users from other fields of digital humanities and social sciences who are interested in the study of socio-cultural phenomena through language, to engage with user-friendly digital tools for the analysis of large text collections. The tutorial is designed in a way that takes full advantage of both linguistic annotations and the available speaker and text metadata to formulate powerful quantitative queries that are then further extended with manual qualitative analysis in order to ensure adequate framing and interpretation of the results.

4The tutorial demonstrates the potential of parliamentary corpora research via concordancers without the need for programming skills. No prior experience in using language corpora and corpus querying tools is required in order to follow this tutorial. While the same analysis could be carried out on any parliamentary corpus with similar annotations and metadata, in this tutorial we will use the siParl 2.0 corpus which contains parliamentary debates of the National Assembly of the Republic of Slovenia from 1990 to 2018, although knowledge of Slovenian is not required to follow the tutorial. To try out the analyses in other languages, we invite you to explore a parliamentary corpus of your choice from those available through CLARIN.