This project aims at comparing the use of the it-cleft by the general population and 10 MPs of the British Parliament.
Corpora used:
Software used:
- AntConc 3.5.6
- Regulex (for RegEx visualisation)
- Python 3.9.13
- R 4.2.1
The study at hand compares the use of it-clefts between the general population and ten Members of the British Parliament. The comparison in primarily made on the different properties of the it-cleft, following automatic extraction from the two corpora and manual annotation thereof. We explore how concrete social factors, such as the gender and the political affiliation of the MPs, affect how they use it-clefts. In a nutshell, politicians tend to use the cleft much more often than the general demographic in spoken discourse. In addition, in both corpora used, although the number of occurrences of the most common categories of cleft properties are very similar, the occurrences of other categories tend to differ significantly when used in political speeches or in everyday life. The most striking observation is the one relevant to the active givenness, namely whether the information contained in the cleft structure is directly relevant to the previous context. The fact that speeches delivered in the Parliament are almost always prepared ones and real aloud lets MPs have a more structure train of thought when talking compared to the general public in spoken discourse. Another interesting finding is the property of the clefts that has to do with the factuality of what is being said. A very low p-value in this case indicates that unclear factuality is present in both corpora but for different reasons.
- Jack Straw
- Jeremy Corbyn
- Gillian Shephard
- Francis Maude
- Michael Forsyth
- Viscount Hailsham
- Patrick McLoughlin
- Kenneth Baker
- Stephen Dorrell
- Edwina Currie
@article{boumparis2022dta-cs,
title = {{Quantitative Comparison of the Usage of Clefts between General Population and British MPs}},
author = {{D}imitris {B}oumparis},
organization = {{University of Antwerp}},
year = {2022},
url = {https://github.com/dimboump/compare-clefts-ukmp}
}