Risk’ in political discourse. A corpus approach to semantic change in German Bundestag debates
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12598584 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Marcus Müller (0000-0002-5562-7201, Institute of Linguistics and Literary Studies, TU Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany, corresponding author), Ruth M Mell (Institute of Linguistics and Literary Studies, TU Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 25 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 347-362 |
| Publication date | 2021-05-07 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Risk Research (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1366-9877 • E-ISSN: 1466-4461 |
| Publisher | Routledge (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/13669877.2021.1913631 |
| OpenAlex | W3163664146 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
| References cited | 33 |
Our paper presents a diachronic corpus linguistic approach to the conceptualisation and framing of ‘risk’ in German parliamentary discourse. We analyse all occurrences of risk based on the complete collection of plenary protocols of the German Bundestag covering the legislative periods 1–18 (1949–2017). We apply methods used in Digital Discourse Analysis to show how the concept of ‘risk’ changes through time. Therefore, we investigate co-occurrences to find typical collocations and contexts. We measured three peaks: the first in the late 1950s, the second from the 1970s onwards, and the third in the first decade of the new millennium. We show that ‘risk’ as a negative and ‘chance’ as a positive concept have partly taken the communicative place of ‘danger’ and ‘possibility’. The collocates of risk that can be related to different knowledge domains increase until 2009. This hints at the growing importance of risk thematizations in more and more thematic contexts. Technology and economics turn out to be the most important of these contexts. The analysis shows a clear tendency towards a negative and rather generic use of the word risk. Our results provide for the first time a data-driven insight into the long-term development of the ‘risk’ concept in political discourse of the Federal Republic of Germany
Corpus linguistics · Framing (construction · German · Legislature · Linguistics · Political science · Politics · Semantic change · Sociology · Computational and Text Analysis Methods · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies · History · Law · Risk Perception and Management
The International Encyclopedia of Language and Social Interaction
Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis
The Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics
Statistics in Corpus Linguistics
Discourse and Context
Corpora and collocations
Discourse and Politics
Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Parliamentary Discourse
Meaning, Discourse and Society
Einführung in die Politolinguistik
Risk in The New York Times (1987–2014)
Risk Society
Toward a computer-aided methodology for discourse analysis
Living in the Anthropocene
The peaks and troughs of corpus-based contextual analysis
On risk defined as an event where the outcome is uncertain
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The social construction of reality
What is Corpus Linguistics
| Unique citing works | 5 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1.67 |
| Citation span | 2023 - 2026 (4) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 5 |