Construing justice: Discourses of ‘rightness’ in the House of Commons: A diachronic corpus-assisted discourse study

The chapter investigates the construal of ‘justice’ within a specialized domain of British politics, i.e. the British House of Commons. As a quintessentially abstract concept, justice is very challenging area to investigate empirically through the lens of corpora. By bringing together the methodological and theoretical tools of (critical) discourse analysis and corpus linguistics (Baker 2006, Bayley & Morley (eds) 2009, Baker & McEnery (eds) 2015, Miller et al. 2014), the chapter engages with this challenge by examining patterns of evaluative orientation and intersubjective positioning (Martin & White 2005, Thompson and Hunston 2006) in a diachronic corpus of British parliamentary debates on the issue of (im)migration. The purpose is to further research into the speakers’ construal of justice as a complex interplay of discursive, socio-political, and socio-cultural (Silverstein 2004) dimensions of what is ‘right’, vis-a-vis strategies of persuasion and legitimation (van Leeuwen 1996, Reyes 2011). In particular, this study focuses on the analysis of the evaluative construction it is * right as a key contested rhetorical terrain through which the members in this powerful and influential institutional setting position themselves to construe ‘justice’ in quite distinct ways.