Strategic uses of parliamentary forms of address: The case of the U.K. Parliament and the Swedish Riksdag

Abstract

The aim of the present study is to examine the interplay between various strategic uses of parliamentary forms of address and institutional discursive practices in the U.K. Parliament and the Swedish Riksdag. Members of Parliament (MPs) have multiple roles and relationships, and these are instantiated in context-dependent, addressee-targeted and audience-oriented choice of forms of address, which have not only deictic, but also relational, interpersonal and strategic functions. The analysis focuses on the ways in which MPs in the two parliaments use and abuse particular addressing and referring strategies to pursue their own agendas and undermine political opponents, as well as to challenge institutional role distribution and hierarchical authority. In both parliaments MPs address each other by means of a relatively restricted and well-defined range of parliamentary forms of address: gender-specific titles, gender-neutral titles, institutional titles and personal names. Two of them, gender-neutral titles and institutional titles, occur in both parliaments but in specific co-occurrences and with different frequencies. Personal names are extensively used in the Swedish Riksdag, whereas their occurrence is only marginal in the U.K. Parliament. Gender-specific titles are systematically used in the U.K. Parliament, but they occur only occasionally in the Swedish Riksdag. An examination of the four categories of parliamentary address has been carried out in terms of three parameters: (in)directness, (non)reciprocity and (in)consistency.