Navigating the financial frontier: a serendipitous journey between corpus linguistics and discourse analysis of economy in parliamentary speeches

Abstract

In the esteemed chambers of Westminster, the United Kingdom’s members of Parliament engage in rigorous discourse regarding economic policies that have far-reaching consequences. The discourse analysis of their speeches helps us understand the formulation of financial regulations that align with the nation’s evolving needs and priorities. Nevertheless, discourse analysis has been criticised for being overtly biased in as much as it cherry-picks the linguistic features it seeks to examine within a data set. Hence, the present study aims to integrate corpus linguistic tools with discourse analysis methods to prepare representative data and to construct an objective pathway for analysis, thereby establishing an impartial avenue for scrutiny while mitigating the critiques often levelled against these two distinct approaches when employed in isolation. To realise these objectives, a corpus-assisted discourse study approach is applied, focusing on the procedural obstacles in the back-and-forth journey between quantitative and qualitative analysis of the discursive representations of the British economy. The study revealed that the integration of corpus tools and discourse methods helped prepare representative data for objective analysis. The integration, also, backed the triangulation of findings and showed that the parliamentarians concentrated on two main discourses of the British economy, namely finance and hardship. The analysis of the linguistic and collocational behaviour of these discourses uncovered that alleviation, scale and source were the three semantic categories of the discursive representation of the British economy.