Speaking up and being heard: the changing metadiscourse about ‘voice’ in British parliamentary debates since 1800

Schroeter, M. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9636-245X and Jung, T. (2024) Speaking up and being heard: the changing metadiscourse about ‘voice’ in British parliamentary debates since 1800. Language and Communication, 94. pp. 41-55. ISSN 0271-5309 doi: 10.1016/j.langcom.2023.12.002

Abstract/Summary

As a metaphor for political power, participation, and legitimacy, the concept of ‘voice’ is central to considerations of representative politics during the modern era. Little is known about how political actors themselves understood and referred to their own voices, those of others, and their respective significance for representative politics. This article focuses on the British Parliament, which was since the eighteenth century regarded as a paradigmatic incarnation of political voice and as the pinnacle of modern representative government. Based on a corpus of Hansard debates from 1800 to 2005, we analyse MPs’ explicit references to ‘voice’ in parliamentary debates. We aim to explore the salience of ‘voice’ for MPs and of different aspects of voice as a vehicle for expressing political will. We also shed light on how metadiscursive references to ‘voice’ change over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/114299
Identification Number/DOI	10.1016/j.langcom.2023.12.002
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Arts, Humanities and Social Science > School of Literature and Languages > Languages and Cultures Arts, Humanities and Social Science > Modern European Histories and Cultures Arts, Humanities and Social Science > Language Text and Power
Publisher	Elsevier
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