Dr Michael Pearce has published an article which explores a corpus of all the UK election manifestos produced by the three main political parties in the period 1900-2010. It offers an alternative perspective on function words in corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis, placing them at the centre rather than the periphery. Michael examines the collocational and colligational profiles of four key function words (
will,
we,
our and
to) and shows how a consideration of the patterns of phraseology in which these words occur can – perhaps surprisingly – reveal aspects of party ideology, as well as pointing to generic change over time.
Michael Pearce 2014.
Key Function Words in a Corpus of UK Election Manifestos. Linguistik online 65: 23-44.
