Chapter 1. Speech in the British Hansard

Abstract

This chapter provides a detailed textual and linguistic history of Hansard, the records of debates of the British parliament from 1803 to the present, on which the Hansard Corpus is based. It analyses how parliamentary speech is recorded and presented across that period, examining the changes in direct and indirect speech types arising from commercial factors, pressure from parliament, editorial practice, and the availability and quality of source material. The chapter concludes with a breakdown, for each period of Hansard’s history, of what the data for that period does and does not represent.