What is it about?
Drawing on theoretical approaches to personal/group behaviour, and informed by Michael Hoey’s priming theory, this paper presents a corpus-assisted discourse study of European Parliament interventions from 2004 to 2011. The study aims to identify the group in the self and the various selves in the individual. For the analysis, three corpora from the European Comparable and Parallel Corpus Archive are explored: EP_EN (with EP interventions: 26,959,446 tokens), HC (with House of Commons interventions: 70,567,728), and SandD_david_martin (with member of European Parliament – MEP – David Martin’s interventions: 116,781). The main tool of analysis is the keyword, as generated by WordSmith 7.0. The analysis proceeds in three stages: stage 1, where the EP_EN and HC wordlists are compared, resulting in EP key priming; stage 2, where the SandD_david_martin and HC wordlists are compared, exposing David Martin’s idiosyncratic productions; and stage 3, where the EP_EN and SandD_david_martin keyword lists are manually compared, leading to the identification of EP priming in David Martin’s interventions.
Why is it important?
Because it uses corpus-based studies to identify similarities and difference between personal production and group production.