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

Abstract

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.