Civil partnership – “gay marriage in all but name”: a corpus-driven analysis of discourses of same-sex relationships in the UK Parliament

Abstract

This paper deals with the language used in the debates in both Houses of Parliament in the United Kingdom that allowed civil partnerships to take place. My aim is to uncover discourses of same-sex relationships which are accessed in British Parliament. For this purpose, a corpus of these debates was compiled and its keywords were taken as a starting point for further analysis. As different keyword lists can be calculated by comparing different data sets, I argue that the best approach in this study is to take the corpus as a whole and to compare it to a reference corpus. I then grouped the keywords thematically and analysed them in context, scrutinising collocations and concordance lines in order to see how (recurrent) uses of language construct gay and lesbian relationships. Different, rather contradicting, discourses are drawn on by different parties in the debates. We can see that discourses are often used to frame a line of argumentation.