Diachronic Variation across Genres and Disciplines: The Irish Question in the British Parliament in the Early 20th Century

The paper presents the outcomes of a combined qualitative/quantitative analysis of diachronic variation across genres. The case in point is the naming of a specific historical event, namely the so called Easter Rising. The paper illustrates, compares and discusses findings emerging from a qualitative analysis of newspaper articles published in 1916 and history books, setting them against those arising from a quantitative study of the Hansard corpus. Focusing on British Parliamentary debates related to the decades 1910-1930, this second part of the analysis adopts a corpus based Discourse Analysis approach to shed light on naming strategies connected to the Easter Rising. Both approaches show how from a wide range of naming strategies, used both in early 20th century newspapers and Parliament, one preferred choice emerges only from the late 1960s, due to the reductionist work of historians who opted for one easily identifiable label to (re)present the complexity of the events.