Abstract
Britain s parliamentary system of government has traditionally been characterised by a two-party system, in which the two dominating parties, Labour and Conservatives, have alternated the roles of government and opposition. However, the same year as electoral leader debates were introduced in Britain, the election results indicated a shift away from this traditional system: no single party emerged as a winner and a coalition government was formed between the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats. This thesis aims to investigate differences and similarities in the vocabulary of the three party leaders invited to participate in the 2010 leader debates, namely David Cameron (Conservative), Gordon Brown (Labour) and Nick Clegg (Liberal Democrat). Furthermore, it considers whether their individual performances at the election debates could have influenced the election outcome. The investigation is based on debate transcripts, which forms the basis for three corpora containing the individual statements of the three politicians. The study consists of three main parts investigating the use of rhetorical devices, personal pronouns and modality respectively. A comparison of the findings revealed that there were both similarities and differences in how Cameron, Brown and Clegg used language to communicate their political arguments, which is likely to have contributed to the audiences overall impression of the three candidates.