A corpus-pragmatic analysis of linguistic democratisation in the British Hansard

Abstract In this article, we investigate changes in British parliamentary discourse by using the Hansard Corpus (1803–2005). Our first goal is to determine whether parliamentary speeches have become colloquialised by studying frequency changes of select features associated with informal spoken language. Second, by analysing data from the House of Commons and the House of Lords separately, we show that the texts from the two Houses should be considered distinct sub-registers, each with their own