Researching the European Parliament with Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies

Abstract

Abstract Parliaments are important and complex institutions. However, they are notably under-researched within linguistics and related fields. This is certainly the case with the European Parliament (EP). Drawing both on Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) and prior, manual research on parliamentary communication, this paper proposes and applies an analytical protocol to examine EP speeches. Although these are disseminated in various forms and through dissimilar means (e.g., live at the EP; the audiovisual format via streaming or recorded videos; or published as parliamentary proceedings), here we focus on proceedings – one of the EP’s main sources of official representation. Following the EP’s (unique) practice, where official proceedings do not distinguish between original and translated speeches but consider all texts of equal (legal) status, this study delves into all speech production in English, without separating source and target texts. In the most orthodox of CADS traditions, analysis proceeds from micro and macro-levels of texts into the macro-context (unlike other academic approaches, in which it proceeds in the opposite direction). This direction forces us to move from tangible, specific data to the enveloping setting in which these data are exchanged.