The Language of Coalition: Does it exist? Do the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives change their language after the 2010 General Election? Does Coalition language exist? Is there a change in the language of the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats after the coalition government was formed? If there are changes, how have changes occurred? Do the parties speak more similarly after the election? Aims Corpus Design Situational parameters were created in order to start collecting and categorising data. These were: the political party, the text type, and the date when the text was produced. Texts were collected from 6 months either side of the election (7 th Nov 2009 – 7 th Nov 2010) (Tognini-Bonelli 2001:61). The corpus is unevenly distributed. The 2 sub-corpora containing texts from before the election have approximately 100,000 words each. The 2 sub-corpora containing texts from after the election have approximately 50,000 words each. Texts of varying lengths have been included, from words (Stubbs 1993:11). The corpus was designed to be representative of a range of texts across time. The corpus has 300,000 words and includes speeches, policy documents, manifestos and conference papers. The organization can be seen in Figure 1. Figure 1. Organization of Final Corpus Is there a change in modality? Picture sources: libdems.org.uk, conservatives.com Table 1.Total instances of must and should in Lib Dem data Differences in normalized frequencies are small Differences in normalized frequencies are small Table 2.Total instances of must and should in Conservative data Initially all modal auxiliary verbs were counted. The normalized frequencies showed little change over time in both parties. Also, Chi-square (X 2 ) showed the results to be statistically insignificant. The results in Tables 1 and 2 are the primary frequencies of must and should. These modals were selected to be further investigated because of their ability to be categorized in the deontic or epistemic modal systems. Each occurrence of must and should was looked at in context to interpret their semantic characteristics. They were categorized as either deontic or epistemic, the results of which can be seen in Tables 3 and 4 below. MUSTSHOULD EpistemicDeonticEpistemicDeontic raw% % % % Before Elec After Elec Total MUSTSHOULD EpistemicDeonticEpistemicDeontic raw% % % % Before Elec After Elec Total Before ElectionAfter Election Change in Frequency raw per 10,000 words raw per 10,000 words % X2X2 must should Total Before ElectionAfter Election Change in Frequency raw per 10,000 words raw per 10,000 words % X2X2 must should Total Table 3. Categorization of should and would into modal system in Lib Dem dataTable 4. Categorization of should and would into modal system in Conservative data Epistemic modality is the system of certainty, whereas deontic modality is the system of obligation and duty. Must is a stronger modal than should in both systems (Wärnsby 2006). The %percentages of epistemic and deontic must across time are very similar, suggesting no change before and after the election. The raw figures, show that the Lib Dems were using deontic must more than the Conservatives. After the election the Lib Dems used 39.77% more instances of deontic must. This suggests that the Lib Dems felt a stronger obligation in their position in government, in comparison to the Conservatives. Epistemic should increases in the Lib Dem data, whilst decreasing in the Conservative data. Convergent change is suggested as a reason for this. After the election Lib Dem should changes in the direction of Conservative should and vice versa (Leech 2009:253-4). The numbers do not meet in the middle, but cross over, suggesting that the parties over compensated in their efforts to be similar to the other party. In conclusion, although the initial frequencies showed little difference over time and between parties, when must and should were categorized into deontic systems differences were apparent. Undergraduate Dissertation 2011 Sophie Parkin