COMPOSICION DEL CONCRETO

When I first started working with the parliamentary debates, I intended to separate the speeches into those that were in favour of the law and those against it, regardless of the law being discussed. With that in mind, I read all the debates and decided which speeches corresponded to each category. However, this proved to be problematic. First, because from the reading of the debates I could see that voting ‘in favour’ did not necessarily mean supporting LGBTQ+ _{rights, especially because voting often} involved specific articles at particular stages of the bills. Because of this, in order to better identify the stance of the politicians involved in the debates I would have needed to consider the broader context of the situation, checking the bills at their different stages. This was extremely time consuming and, even then, not

straightforward. For example, often politicians voted in favour of the bills even when in their speeches they did not express full support of LGBTQ+ _{equality. The reason} why this happens is difficult to ascertain, although it may have something to do with the idiosyncrasy of Chilean politics, or with pressure or specific agreements within

political parties. Additionally, by reading the debates and recalling my own

knowledge of the politicians involved in them, it was clear that those who mentioned gay people or sexual identity more often were those who were in favour of LGBTQ+ rights, while those opposing them did not tend to refer to LGBTQ+ _{matters as the} cause of their opposition. Many times, reasons to oppose the law were based on technicalities that had little to do with the main topic discussed. However, I could see that there was opposition based on what have been traditionally used as opposing arguments, such as the ‘thin edge of the wedge’ argument or a rejection of

homosexuality based on an alleged threat to children, as these were usually addressed by those in favour of the law, who referred to this opposition as unfounded.

Considering this, it was clear that there was an absence in the parliamentary debates, something which was not being said, but was being contested nonetheless. Because of this, I decided that it was more useful to include all sides in the analysis, so as to get a better picture of the representations being drawn on. As a consequence, the corpus of parliamentary debates was to be included in its entirety, that is to say, I would carry out a corpus analysis on all 231,467 words. Although I did not separate stances, I do mention them in the final analysis of this corpus, as it is sometimes difficult to understand the extracts I discuss without them. I determined these stances by reading extended concordances or the entire speeches where the concordances analysed occurred.

Since at this stage I was still trying to determine whether the Parliamentary Debates Corpus would be useful for my study at all, I proceeded to obtain the collocates of

homosexual* with the intention of exploring the data set. As I started this exploratory stage, I made some modifications in the parameters that I had applied in the

analysis of these data sets later. The change in the parameters consisted of a new MI cut-off point. Following Gablasova et al. (2017), I decided to modify the cut-off point from an MI score equal or higher than 5 to one equal or higher than 6. This resulted in the retrieval of thirteen collocates of homosexual*, which can be seen in Table 4.11.

RANK FREQ FREQ(L) FREQ(R) STAT COLLOCATE TRANSLATION

1 8 5 3 8.77 heterosexual heterosexual (s.) 2 54 33 21 8.58 heterosexuales heterosexual (pl.) 3 74 68 6 8.17 parejas couples 4 15 15 0 7.72 u or 5 10 9 1 7.70 uniones partnerships 6 10 9 1 7.37 sean be (3rd _{p. pl.)} 7 59 45 14 6.90 matrimonio marriage

8 6 2 4 6.71 conviven live together (3rd _{p. pl.)}

9 5 2 3 6.51 niño child

10 5 2 3 6.39 familias families

11 5 3 2 6.32 homosexual homosexual (s.) 12 5 4 1 6.17 condición condition/state

13 6 5 1 6.03 paso Step

Table 4.11. Collocates of homosexual* in the Parliamentary Debates Corpus (PDC).

As Table 4.11 shows, the collocates retrieved from the parliamentary debates were not very diverse, mostly relating to marriage, families and sexuality. Despite that, I

proceeded to analyse the 262 concordance lines where these collocates appeared in the same way described in section 4.5.3.1. This resulted in the identification of nine representations, which are shown in Table 4.12. Since this was an exploratory analysis, the representations were not yet grouped into overarching ones, but were only divided into representations of people and representations of the laws.

PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES CORPUS

REPRESENTATIONS OF GAY PEOPLE

1. Gay people are discriminated against (12 lines or 4.6%) 2. Gay people have rights (9 lines or 3.4%)

3. Gay people are like other people (6 lines or 2.3%) 4. Gay couples are unprotected (30 lines or 11%) REPRESENTATIONS OF THE LAWS

5. The civil-partnership law is too similar to marriage (19 lines or 7.3%)

6. The civil-partnership/anti-discrimination law is a step towards gay marriage (24 lines or 9.2%)

7. The civil-partnership law is a step towards adoption by gay couples (6 lines or 2.3%) 8. The civil-partnership law was created to benefit gay people only (5 lines or 1.9%) 9. The civil-partnership law is not necessary for heterosexual people (9 lines or 3.4%)

Table 4.12. Representations in the concordances of the collocates of homosexual* in the Parliamentary Debates Corpus (PDC). The figures in brackets indicate the number of concordances instantiating each representation, which are also presented as percentages of the

total number of lines scrutinised (i.e. 262 concordances).

Since the representations identified in the parliamentary debates at this point of the analysis involved some positive portrayals of gay people, as well as both positive and negative representations of the bills under discussion, which were also likely to provide insights about how gay people are represented, I decided to include the parliamentary debates in my study. However, at this point I decided to test another methodological approach and look at all the concordance lines produced by a search of the query homosexual*, as a way of exploring the data. My intention was to determine whether the analysis of all concordances added anything different to the representations identified through collocational analysis.