Research team
Gender dynamics in political debates. A diachronic quantitative and qualitative linguistic analysis of verbal interruptions in the federal parliament of Germany.
Abstract
Previous research on verbal interruptions in parliaments has suggested the speaker's gender has an influence on the quantity and quality of verbal interruptions occurring during their speech. However, the corpora investigated in these studies were far too small and none of them combined quantitative statistical methods and qualitative methods to analyse a large diachronic data set. The proposed project aims to contribute to closing this gap in research by analysing a data set of 90,000 verbal interruptions collected from the plenary protocols of the German federal parliament from three different time periods, i.e. the 1950s, 1980s and 2010s, quantitatively with regard to differences in the treatment of female and male speakers. We want to investigate whether, parallel to the increased emancipation and participation of women, (1) the frequency of interrupting female (vs. male) speakers changes, as well as (2) the way they are addressed. The qualitative analysis of a smaller data set of verbal interruptions collected from debates on the gendered topic of abortion will rely on linguistic politeness theory will take a closer look at fine-grained differences between interruptions targeted at female and male speakers respectively. By doing this, the project hopes to lay bare how gradual but fundamental societal changes with respect to female emancipation are reflected in the linguistic dynamics of public interaction in an established political institution.Researcher(s)
- Promoter: Mortelmans Tanja
- Co-promoter: Vandekerckhove Reinhild
- Fellow: Irmer Marie
Research team(s)
Project type(s)
- Research Project
Gender dynamics in political debates. A diachronic quantitative and qualitative analysis of verbal interruptions in the federal parliament of Germany
Abstract
Previous research on verbal interruptions in parliaments has suggested the speaker's gender has an influence on the quantity and quality of verbal interruptions occurring during their speech. However, the corpora investigated in these studies were far too small and none of them combined quantitative statistical methods and qualitative methods to analyse a large diachronic data set. The proposed project aims to contribute to closing this gap in research by analysing a data set of 90,000 verbal interruptions collected from the plenary protocols of the German federal parliament from three different time periods, i.e. the 1950s, 1980s and 2010s, quantitatively with regard to differences in the treatment of female and male speakers. We want to investigate whether, parallel to the increased emancipation and participation of women, (1) the frequency of interrupting female (vs. male) speakers changes, as well as (2) the way they are addressed. The qualitative analysis of a smaller data set of verbal interruptions collected from debates on the gendered topic of abortion will take a closer look at fine-grained differences between interruptions targeted at female and male speakers respectively. By doing this, the project hopes to contribute to the ongoing research on gender bias in public interaction and female emancipation.Researcher(s)
- Promoter: Mortelmans Tanja
- Co-promoter: Vandekerckhove Reinhild
- Fellow: Irmer Marie
Research team(s)
Project type(s)
- Research Project