Retrospective Labelling and Persuasion in Parliamentary Debates by Members of the Government and the Opposition in Spain and United Kingdom

A Contrastive Study

Abstract

Encapsulators, or retrospective labels, are cohesive mechanisms that compress the propositional content of a stretch of text. When they include lexical items, they may introduce implicit evaluations that affect their antecedent. They have been subject of analysis in different genres, including parliamentary debates (Botley 2006; Autor 2013a; Ribera 2016, 2019; Ribera & Marín 2018; Marín & Ribera 2018; Vajnovszki 2022), where they seem to play a major role as persuasive devices. Studies on encapsulation based on parliamentary corpora focus on different parameters, but they have not delved into the influence of a specific variable that seems to generate important divergences in the use of encapsulators: if the speaker is a member of the Government or of the Opposition. The aim of this article to identify differences in the functions performed by encapsulators due to the parameter Government vs. Opposition. This study is based on a corpus of 400 texts containing an encapsulator composed by a demonstrative, an adjective and a verb that have been selected following a Corpus-assisted Discourse Studies approach (CADS) in the Spanish and British versions of the ParlaMint corpus (Erjavec et al. 2023). Results show that members of the Opposition use more frequently encapsulators that introduce negative evaluations in speeches that attack directly the opponents’ images, whereas members of the Government tend to exploit this resource for self-praise through positive evaluations.