Parliamentary Discourse Research Articles

Policy goals, partisanship and paradigmatic change in energy policy – analyzing parliamentary discourse in Germany over 30 years

ABSTRACTThe successful implementation of the Paris Agreement requires substantial energy policy change on the national level. In national energy policy-making, climate change mitigation goals have to be balanced with arguments on other national energy policy goals, namely limiting cost and increasing energy security. Thus far, very little is known about the relative importance of these goals and how they are related to political partisanship. In order to address this gap, we focus on parliamentary discourse around low-carbon energy futures in Germany over the past three decades and analyze the relative importance of, and partisanship around, energy policy goals. We find that the political discourse revolves around four, rather than three, goals as conventionally assumed; improving the competitiveness of the national energy technology industry is not only an additional energy policy goal, it is also highly important in the political discourse. In general, the relative importance of these goals is rather stable over time and partisanship around them is limited. Yet, a sub-analysis of the discourse on renewable energy technologies reveals a high level of partisanship, albeit decreasing over time. Particularly, the energy industry goal’s importance increases while its partisanship vanishes. We discuss how these findings can inform future energy policy research and provide a potential inroad for more ambitious national energy policies.Key policy insightsIn addition to the three classic goals of energy policy (limiting cost, securing access and reducing the environmental burden) we identify a fourth policy goal: strengthening the national energy technology industryConformity between the three classical energy and the industrial policy goals is a key driver explaining policy changeFor renewable energy technologies, partisanship around this fourth goal is lower than around other goals and decreases over time as innovation allows these technologies to increasingly correspond to policy-makers’ high-level goalsExtant research underestimates the importance of industry policy goals, but overestimates environmental co-benefits of low-carbon energy optionsParadigmatic policy change in Germany did not depend on top-down shifts in high-level policy goals but was driven by lower-level technology-specific goals

Book review: Catalina Fuentes-Rodríguez and Gloria Álvarez-Benito (eds), A Gender-based Approach to Parliamentary Discourse: The Andalusian Parliament

Book review: Catalina Fuentes-Rodríguez and Gloria Álvarez-Benito (eds), <i>A Gender-based Approach to Parliamentary Discourse: The Andalusian Parliament</i>

The Cognitive-Pragmatic Category of Relevance in the Structure of Parliamentary and Political Communication

The article deals with the cognitive-communicative aspects of political, and specifically parliamentary communication (parliamentary discourse differs from other kinds of political communication by topical relevance, public nature and institutional regulation of polemics, carefulness of argumentation, a certain culture of reasoning, discursive coherence (precedence), protocol intertextuality, and the search for consensus necessary for making a decision or adopting a law). Based on the cognitive methodological procedures, the author suggests a structural model of the cognitive space of parliamentary discourse demonstrating the interaction between hierarchically organized propositions. The author poses a hypothesis about the priority of the principle of relevance in the cognitive structure of political communication. The aim of the study is to describe the mechanism of decision making as the main functional characteristic of parliamentary communication. The role of consensus and the necessity of a constructive deliberative component in the process of interaction between a political group and the society at large is specially stressed. The author singles out differential features of political persuasiveness and reveals the mechanism of interaction between the inner and outer contexts in the process of institutional verbal communication. The material of the study includes the political discursive formation of modern France. The article analyzes the degree of relevance of the political elite discourse in the public consciousness of the civil society on the example of the political crisis culminating in the yellow vests movement. The analysis leads the author to the conclusion about the necessity of further study of the structure and functions of political relevance as a conclusive mechanism and means of reaching a consensus in deliberative political communication.

Political discourse and the study of parliamentary communication: a comparative analysis

The article is devoted to an analytical review of the main areas of theoretical and applied research of parliamentary communication, among which a special attention is given to the theory of political discourse and political linguistics. The prospects for a comparative study of public parliamentary communication are outlined as oneof the comparatively not studied components of political discourse. Today parliamentary discourse, being one of the components of political discourse, is the subject and object of several humanitarian disciplines. The main system-forming factor of parliamentary discourse is its institutionality, which determines both the form and the content of parliamentary communication. The development of parliamentary communication as a democratic form of exercising state power is influenced by historical, social and cultural progress of mankind as a whole, and the specifics of achieving this progress in separate countries. Despite the existence of a universal democratic framework that determines the status of parliament as a social institution in different countries, its activities have national and cultural specifics. Comparison and identification of universal and national-cultural-specific language features of the parliamentary discourse in different countries are the urgent tasks for political linguistics to fulfill.

Discourse markers in the European Parliamentary Discourse: gender aspect

Discourse markers in the European Parliamentary Discourse: gender aspect

Public parliamentary discourse in Russia and Germany: speech and genre specifics

In the article the approaches to the problem of political discourse speech genres differentiation are discussed based on the comparative analysis of the German and Russian public parliamentary speech authentic samples. The special status of the public speech phenomenon in parliamentary communication and its conditionality by parliamentary regulations are discussed. The communicative roles of plenary sessions’ participants in Germany and Russia are described. In both parliaments, public parliamentary speech is exercised in a dialogue form, managed and controlled by the president of the Bundestag / presiding plenary session. The existence of common political goals of German and Russian public parliamentary communication proves the expediency of its comprehensive comparative study, taking into account extralinguistic and linguistic characteristics of public parliamentary speeches. The statements, representing the German and Russian public parliamentary speech, form a set of institutional genres, the emergence and functioning of which are predetermined by the parliamentary regulations. In both parliaments, they include a report, a statement, a question, and a reply, presented in several intragenre varieties, with specific national variants. Each of these genres is characterized by the use of specific methods of language expression, emotional utterances, rhetorical and polemical techniques.

ОСОБЕННОСТИ ВЗАИМОДЕЙСТВИЯ ВЕРБАЛЬНОГО И НЕВЕРБАЛЬНОГО ПОВЕДЕНИЯ УЧАСТНИКОВ ПОЛИТИЧЕСКИХ ТЕЛЕДЕБАТОВ НА ЭТАПЕ ДИСКУССИИ В АСПЕКТЕ МУЛЬТИМОДАЛЬНОЙ ИНТЕРАКЦИИ

The article is devoted to identifying the features of the verbal and nonverbal behaviour of TV debates communicants-participants at the stage of discussion. The examples of using the strategies and tactics, the most typical of the British parliamentary discourse speech, are analysed. The nonverbal components of communication are considered in the aspect of multimodal interaction. Video analysis is used as a research method. The study examines what ways the interactants use communicating with each other, with the audience, as well as with the presenter in order to attract attention and influence the recipients. The most frequently used means of verbal and nonverbal communication for this purpose are revealed.

It's about people: identifying the focus of parliamentary debates through a corpus-driven approach

The aim of this paper is two-fold: (1) to demonstrate the usefulness of corpus-driven methods in determining a research focus, and (2) to show that ‘people’-focussing is a key feature of UK and Ghanaian parliamentary debates. Identifying one's research focus in discourse analysis after collecting a large amount of data can be challenging. It is relatively easier to pinpoint the items and focus of the research when the researcher employs a corpus-based method, since he or she normally has a theory to validate, refute or refine. However, when the researcher has assembled his or her data without having in advance specific theories, features, themes and concepts relating to the discourse that he or she intends to study, it becomes difficult to identify the essential issues on which to concentrate and explore. Perhaps this is even more challenging when dealing with parliamentary debates data given the wide-ranging subjects and alternative courses of action deliberated by parliamentarians. In such a situation, a corpus-driven method can be highly useful. As part of a major study of parliamentary discourse, this paper demonstrates how a corpus-driven method can help in determining one's research focus in the study of parliamentary debates.

Democracy and discriminatory strategies in parliamentary discourse

Democracy and discriminatory strategies in parliamentary discourse

Definition as an argumentative strategy in parliamentary discourse

Abstract The present paper aims to investigate the main argumentative uses of definitions in various communicative contexts of the parliamentary discourse, on the basis of two sets of data, selected from the British and the Romanian Parliaments. Relevant categories of argumentative definitions are identified and described, by taking into consideration their linguistic structure and rhetorical features, as well as their current association with other types of arguments and pragmatic strategies. The cross-cultural and comparative perspective allows us to grasp to what extent the institutional forms, procedural rules and cultural models can actually influence the argumentative choices and reasoning patterns in the specific cases of the British and the Romanian Parliamentary discourse.

Spaces of concern: Parliamentary discourse on Britain's overseas territories

This article explores discussion of Britain's overseas territories in the UK Parliament. It provides quantitative and qualitative analyses of Hansard from the start of the Coalition Government in 2010 until the prorogation of Parliament in 2017, identifying dominant concerns regarding financial transparency, sovereignty disputes, and whether Parliament should legislate for the territories. The character of debate on the overseas territories suggests first that they occupy a particular and equivocal “space of concern” within the national legislature, and second that this attention often intersects and overlaps with a focus on other places and spatial scales in which concern for the overseas territories is sometimes secondary or subsumed. This discourse highlights uncertainty and questioning over the nature of the overseas territories’ relationship with the UK. The inclusion of the affairs of distant territories within national political discourse provides a rich and unique example of the disjunction between sovereignty, state and territory, and highlights the ongoing complexity and ambiguity of the UK's political geography.

Особенности речевого поведения личности интровертного и экстравертного типа в парламентском дискурсе

Особенности речевого поведения личности интровертного и экстравертного типа в парламентском дискурсе

What genres tell us about evidentials and vice versa

AbstractThe aim of this paper is twofold. First, it aims to delve into the influence of contextual discursive factors in determining the type of evidential chosen and the pragmatic functions developed by evidentials in Spanish parliamentary discourse; second, it shows how evidentials can also provide useful new insight on the genre. A corpus study has been carried out studying the Spanish evidential discourse markeral parecerin parliamentary debates. The analysis shows how real examples ofal parecerhardly fit any category of evidentials posited previously; data also illustrates how factors such as the discursive role or the part of the parliamentary process do affect the meaning ofal parecerand change the pragmatic nuances conveyed by the discourse marker.

Corruption is a big issue: A corpus-assisted study of the discursive construction of corruption in Ghanaian parliamentary discourse

The paper examines the discursive construction of corruption by Ghanaian parliamentarians. It uses as dataset a 1.9 million-word corpus of Hansards of debates and committee reports between 2005 and 2016. It draws on the frame theory and employs a corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) approach to explore the languageof parliamentarians (MPs) in order to investigate how Ghanaian parliamentarians frame corruption. The paper attempts to answer the question: how do Ghanaian parliamentarians construct the subject of corruption in their debates and interactions? The paper fi nds thatMPs discursively construct corruption as a huge systematic social canker that hinders socio-politico-economic development of Ghana. This suggests that stronger measures andmore formidable parliamentary commitment are needed to fi ght corruption. The paper hasimplications for parliamentarians’ fi ght against corruption in Ghana.

British Lobbying in Newspaper and Parliamentary Discourse, 1800–1950

AbstractLobbying is a significant component of the modern politics industry in Britain, but we know relatively little about its historical origins and evolution. This article draws on parliamentary debates and three databases which together account for 51 newspaper titles, in order to explore how lobbying was discussed in parliament and the media between 1800 and 1950, and to gauge the growing professionalisation of lobbying. Perceptions of lobbying became somewhat less negative over the period; there are relatively few reports or allegations of corruption associated with lobbying; and lobbying by the railway industry seems to have been less substantial, while public sector lobbying was more significant, than is commonly supposed. Direct advocacy with policymakers is overwhelmingly the dominant tactic used by lobbyists of the period, with few reports of coalitions or grass‐roots campaigns. Particular concerns were expressed about the influence of lobbying around private bills. While lobbying back‐bench MPs and parliamentary committees (rather than ministers and civil servants) accounted for over 80% of the activity revealed across the whole period, there are signs by the middle of the 20th century that the focus of lobbyists is beginning to turn away from Westminster and towards Whitehall. The article paints a detailed view of the scale, scope, and significance of lobbying as it was developing into a national and systematic industry.

Cultural context in parliamentary discourse with examples of parallel speeches in the polish Sejm and the German Bundestag – reflections from a translator’s perspective

Abstract The article presents examples of cultural references made by Polish MPs speaking in the Polish Sejm and German MPs speaking in the German Bundestag. The term “cultural context” will be used as defined by Boniecka (1994). There will be presented two examples of parliamentary speeches given in the Polish Sejm and the German Bundestag from a larger corpus of collected data for the purpose of the research on the appellative function of the word “wish”. The starting point for compiling texts was the minutes of the parliamentary debates of the Polish Sejm which contained the word “życzyć” (“wish” in Polish) and the minutes of parliamentary debates in the Bundestag which contained the word “wünschen” (‘wish” in German) in the first person singular and plural. The topic of the speeches had a secondary meaning. On the basis of the examples it discussed will be shown that parallel texts of MP’s speeches are a valuable teaching material in specialised language lessons.

Conservative Feminists? An Exploration of Feminist Arguments in Parliamentary Debates of the Bundestag1

Past studies have shown that conservative governments and parties are unlikely places for women’s representation, especially for feminist policy adoption. Contrary to existing studies, this article argues that conservative governments can be places for feminist interests’ representation. To demonstrate this, I analyse the parliamentary discourse surrounding two instances of feminist policy adoption under Germany’s conservative government in 2006 and 2015, respectively. I find that in both instances, feminist arguments dominated the debates and, most importantly, that these findings still hold when controlling for party ideology.

Theory and practice of the 'first socialist deputy of the Americas'. The activity of Alfredo Palacios in the Argentine Parliament and its impact in the socialist press, 1904-1908

En 1904, el Partido Socialista argentino logró consagrar al joven abogado Alfredo Palacios como diputado nacional en representación del distrito obrero de La Boca, al sur de la ciudad de Buenos Aires. A los ojos de los socialistas, la llegada de Palacios al Congreso confirmaba la corrección de una estrategia orientada a la “acción política” y a la participación electoral, el eje de la diferenciación con los anarquistas desde la década previa. El objetivo de este artículo es rastrear las grandes líneas de argumentación estratégica y política que atravesaron las intervenciones parlamentarias de Palacios a lo largo de estos cuatro años para ponerlas en relación con los planteos más generales que guiaban la actividad del Partido Socialista. La intención es determinar cuál fue la relación entre la práctica legislativa de Palacios y la orientación estratégica del socialismo argentino, y el modo en que una y otra se influyeron mutuamente. El artículo busca mostrar que, si ya desde los años previos la preocupación por la acción política y la opción estratégica por la táctica electoral y parlamentaria venían ocupando un lugar incontestable en la prédica política del PS, a partir de 1904 esto se vio reforzado por la implementación práctica de esta doctrina.

1970年代フランス福祉国家と家族モデルの変容過程 : 議会の言説・文書分析から

1970年代フランス福祉国家と家族モデルの変容過程 : 議会の言説・文書分析から

ПЕРСУАЗИВНОСТЬ КАК КОГНИТИВНАЯ СТРАТЕГИЯ В ПАРЛАМЕНТСКОМ ДИСКУРСЕ

The paper deals with the analysis of parliamentary discourse as a speech interaction in the process of problem discussion and consensual political decision-taking. The author models cognitive processes, tactics and strategies, which stimulate the choice of the right course of action in the conditions of competition and cooperation. Persuasion is understood as a dominant line, following which the members of parliament change the political settings of their opponents, their priorities, beliefs and evaluations. Parliamentary discourse relies heavily on argumentation and persuasion.