Mapping Hansard Impression Management Strategies through Time and Space

ABSTRACT

Impolite behaviour is thought to be easier to investigate than polite or politic behaviour in diachronic contexts, because of attracting more evaluative comment. But an approach based on such metapragmatic commentary can miss a lot of facework strategies in contexts such as the UK parliament (modern and historical). In this paper, I draw on Historic Hansard datasets (1812–2003) to demonstrate how a (semi)automatic method involving contiguous searches of two-to-four features can better reveal the nuances of these MPs’ facework strategies than a focus on metapragmatic terms has afforded hitherto. The (semi)automatic method uses the recently created Historic Thesaurus Semantic Tagger (HTST) to search for meaning constellations (Archer and Malory 2017). Meaning constellations relating to facework are made up of sequences of semantic fields and/or parts-of-speech which, when organised in certain ways, achieve im/politeness, politic behaviour, strategic ambiguity, a combination of face enhancement and face threat, etc. This paper discusses a number of these meaning constellations, with a particular focus on those which engage in both face enhancement and face aggravation simultaneously (whilst nonetheless avoiding the label, “unparliamentary language”).

KEYWORDS:

• Hansard records
• parliamentary language
• politeness
• impoliteness
• facework
• self-presentation
• impression management
• semantic tagging
• meaning constellation speech act

Notes

¹ The HTST, and HT_themes, were developed as part of the cross-university, AHRC/ESRC funded SAMUELS project (grant reference AH/L010062/1).

² Thanks to the digital channel, BBC Parliament, it is possible to check the audio-visual records of some – but not all – of England’s parliamentary proceedings from 1989 onwards. BBC Parliament provides access to the House of Commons Chamber live, select coverage of the House of Lords, and unedited coverage of about ten committees each week (Rogers and Walters 2015). Any recordings older than two years are deposited in the National Film Archive.

³ See Vice and Farrell (2017) for an account of how (and the conditions under which) Hansard recorders have created their reports during the period covered by this study.

⁴ Minutes earlier, the Labour MP for Ealing North had stated that, ‘If, by some tragedy, she [i.e., Thatcher] came to power, recent industrial skirmishes would appear trivial’. Note the use of skirmishes as a means of downplaying the difficulties faced by Callaghan and his government. Note, too, Molloy’s use of tragedy to describe (what, at the time, was still) a hypothetical world where Thatcher was Prime Minister, and his prophetic implication, via trivial, that industrial turmoil would consequently ensue.

⁵ Thanks to Archer and Malory’s (2017) meaning constellation method, I have also been able to provide evidence of strategies differing across the two Houses and/or over time (see especially 2.1–2.3).