Theo Jung

In the last few years, I’ve been in close collaboration with Professor Melani Schroeter (University of Reading), one of the foremost experts on silence and communicative norms and the author of the groundbreaking Silence and Concealment in Political Discourse (2013) which was formative for my own interest in the history of political silences.

In the past year, we have managed to gain funding from the Leverhulme Trust for a collaborative research project titled “Between Voice and Silence: Communicative Norms in Diaries 1840-1990“, which has started in October 2023, involving two more colleagues: Clara Lloyd (Reading) and Pia Schmüser (Halle).

At the same time and in some ways as a preliminary study to this longer-term project, we have also co-written an article on communicative norms in a very different setting: the British Parliament. This article has now been published in the journal Language and Communication, and can be accessed through this link.

Abstract

As a metaphor for political power, participation, and legitimacy, the concept of ‘voice’ is central to considerations of representative politics during the modern era. Little is known about how political actors themselves understood and referred to their own voices, those of others, and their respective significance for representative politics. This article focuses on the British Parliament, which was since the eighteenth century regarded as a paradigmatic incarnation of political voice and as the pinnacle of modern representative government. Based on a corpus of Hansard debates from 1800 to 2005, we analyse MPs’ explicit references to ‘voice’ in parliamentary debates. We aim to explore the salience of ‘voice’ for MPs and of different aspects of voice as a vehicle for expressing political will. We also shed light on how metadiscursive references to ‘voice’ change over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Schroeter, Melani / Jung, Theo: Speaking Up and Being Heard. The Changing Metadiscourse about ‘Voice’ in British Parliamentary Debates since 1800, in: Language & Communication 94 (2024), 41–55. DOI: 10.1016/j.langcom.2023.12.002.