The language and motivations of expertise in political discourse

The study aims to explore how language elements of specialised and political communication are represented in parliamentary discourse. Within the ParlaMint corpus, we examine Hungarian parliamentary speeches between 2020 and 2022 on the ‘KATA’ (specific tax of small taxpayer businesses). The specialised terms, terms used in standard language, sentiment and attitude values are analysed. Results show that there is a significant difference in term use and the sentence sentiments between the different discourse participants (policy actors, opposition, governing party). There are only a few emotionless speeches, and no large differences in the proportion of terms and emotions are observed. The results can be relevant for studies on populist communication, the relationship between technocracy and democracy, and the methodological aspects of computer-assisted discourse analysis. The paper also outlines future orientations for research, including extended thematic analysis and investigation of contextual shifts in the actual meaning of terms within political discourse.