Caoimhe Power Gallagher

(she/her)

Research

Thesis

‘Learning to Talk the Language of Men?’A Corpus-Informed, Critical Discourse Analysis of the Masculinisation of the Linguistic Styles of Women Teachtaí Dála in the National Parliament of Ireland

Summary. My research is concerned with the linguistic styles of modern-day Irish women politicians and questions if their linguistic styles grow more ‘masculine’ as their involvement in politics expands. Past research (e.g. Hargrave and Blumenau 2022; Jones 2016) suggests that women politicians need to speak like men to succeed. To undertake this analysis, I have created a new database of nearly 38 million words spoken by 290 TDs from 2011– 2024. The linguistic styles of Ireland’s women politicians are investigated through a mixed methodological approach of Corpus Linguistics (CL) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). Modern understandings of gendered discourse have informed the analytical framework. To disentangle a gender effect from an experience effect, each speech in the corpus is marked up and linked to metadata for a particular speaker. For each speaker, the following metadata is stored in a separate database: gender, age, years of political experience at the time of speaking, and political party. This study is expected to reveal significant patterns in how women TDs adjust their linguistic styles to fit the traditionally masculine norms of parliamentary discourse, in accord with previous research which suggests that “power speaks with a male voice” (Jones 2016, 636). Additionally, outliers may strengthen feminist imagined futures and support the vision that ‘women’s talk’ does belong in politics.

References 

Funding sources

Welsh Graduate School for the Social Sciences (WGSSS) ESRC Doctoral Studentship Award

Biography

Education

• 2023: MA Applied Linguistics with First Class Honours, Mary Immaculate College, Ireland
• 2021: BA Applied Languages with First Class Honours, University of Limerick, Ireland
• 2021: CertTESOL, University of Limerick, Ireland

Supervisors

Amanda Potts

Reader (Associate Professor)