Referential Cohesion, Ambiguity, Vagueness and Generality in Parliamentary Debate*

Abstract

Political discourse has been characterised as being ‘vague’ and ‘ambiguous’. It is argued that politicians tend to use generic and unspecific words in order to avoid explicit commitment (McGee 2018). Although this situation may describe discourse genres such as political interviews and election debates, it is unclear that it can be applied to parliamentary debate. This study analyses a corpus consisting of two parliamentary debates in English and Catalan with respect to ambiguity, vagueness and generality in connection to referential cohesion. Three variables are qualitatively and quantitatively analysed: a) the abstractness of the topics, b) the non‐specific or specific nature of these entities, and c) the grammatical or lexical nature of the units that maintain referential cohesion. The results show that ambiguity and vagueness are rather infrequent in parliamentary debate. However, the high frequencies of non‐concrete referential entities, and of non‐specific referents characterise parliamentary debate as a general discourse. As a counterpart, lexical cohesion devices as repetition and encapsulation highlight the topics under discussion, what leads to avoid ambiguity and vagueness.