Engendering conflict? A corpus-assisted analysis of women MPs positioning on the war in Iraq.

In the House of Commons on March 18th 2003, a Government motion on war against Iraq was voted and passed by 396 votes to 217. Looking at the breakdown of votes on a gender basis, it emerges that 22% of all women MPs voted for a resolution against the war, as compared to 35% of male MPs. This would seem to contradict traditional expectations about gender roles, going against the cultural stereotype which sees women and men as coming from different planets: Venus and Mars respectively. The question thus arises of whether women within this discourse domain do make a difference. Drawing on the combined tools and methodologies of corpus-assisted discourse analysis (Partington, Morley, Haarman 2004, Bayley 2004, Miller 2006), and the appraisal framework within Systemic Functional Linguistics (Martin 2000; Martin and Rose 2003; White 2002; 2003; Martin & White 2005; Miller to appear), the paper explores how the role and expression of stance or positioning of women MPs is enacted across a one million word TEI encoded corpus of parliamentary events (debates, statements, question time, etc.) concerning the war in Iraq. The mark-up language can provide the resources to verify the Speaker’s status and a certain number of role features, such as gender, party and institutional function. The methodology foregrounds a qualitative analysis of selected stretches of discourse analysed against the background of quantitative data which supports the general pattern of occurrence and co-occurrence within this specialised discourse, along with the configuration of evaluative meanings identified in the corpus. Research questions include what kind of linguistic resources and rhetorical strategies do women MPs employ in the House in relation to evaluation and stance regarding the conflict in Iraq.