“I entirely understand” is a Blairism

Abstract

While the study of idiolect is a neglected area in corpus linguistics, the present article suggests that it can be fruitful. As a tool for studying an idiolect, the three-million-word Tony Blair Corpus is introduced. The maximiser collocations occurring in this corpus are compared to those in the BNC in order to identify those which are truly typical of the individual. A quantitative analysis involving three measures of collocational strength (normalised frequency, Mutual Information and log-likelihood) provide candidate collocations which strongly diverge in the two corpora. These are then subjected to tests of synonym preference and register specificity, resulting in a small number of collocations which can count as Blairisms.

The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics

“…Studies examining the linguistic structures of political discourse may also aim to isolate those which characterise a single group or speaker, with objects of study including UK Prime Ministers Blair (Mollin 2009) and Thatcher (Ponton 2010) and US Presidents Clinton and Trump (Parvaresh 2018). As this list indicates, the focus to date has tended to be high-profile politicians.…”

Corpus linguistics in the study of political discourse: recent directions

“…Studies examining the linguistic structures of political discourse may also aim to isolate those which characterise a single group or speaker, with objects of study including UK Prime Ministers Blair (Mollin 2009) and Thatcher (Ponton 2010) and US Presidents Clinton and Trump (Parvaresh 2018). As this list indicates, the focus to date has tended to be high-profile politicians.…”

Untitled

“…Due to the lack of relevant large corpora, idiolect and familect have not been compared and studied together, particularly in fiction. Regarding corpus linguistics, idiolect was studied by Barlow M. (Barlow, 2010), Mollin S. (Mollin, 2009), Seminck O. (Seminck, 2021), whereas there has been a number of more recent studies into the matter of idiolect in fiction (Shcherbak, 2015; .…”