Patterns of discourse semantics

Abstract

Corpus-assisted analyses of public discourse often focus on the lexical level. This article argues in favour of corpus-assisted analyses of discourse, but also in favour of conceptualising salient lexical items in public discourse in a more determined way. It draws partly on non-Anglophone academic traditions in order to promote a conceptualisation of discourse keywords, thereby highlighting how their meaning is determined by their use in discourse contexts. It also argues in favour of emphasising the cognitive and epistemic dimensions of discourse-determined semantic structures. These points will be exemplified by means of a corpus-assisted, as well as a frame-based analysis of the discourse keyword financial crisis in British newspaper articles from 2009. Collocations of financial crisis are assigned to a generic matrix frame for ‘event’ which contains slots that specify possible statements about events. By looking at which slots are more, respectively less filled with collocates of financial crisis, we will trace semantic presence as well as absence, and thereby highlight the pragmatic dimensions of lexical semantics in public discourse. The article also advocates the suitability of discourse keyword analyses for systematic contrastive analyses of public/political discourse and for lexicographical projects that could serve to extend the insights drawn from corpus-guided approaches to discourse analysis.

Yuanization of the Russian economy: Politicization of the discourse

“…Частый сюжет применения методов дискурсивного анализа в экономике -финансовый кризис 2008-2009 гг. (Schroeter and Storjohann, 2015;Kelsey et al, 2017). Упомянем и недавнюю работу отечественных авторов по построению индекса неопределенности экономической политики для России на основе новостных статей интернет-изданий (Петрова, Трунин, 2023).…”

Contrastive analysis of keywords in discourses

“…mean, is what we learn about them in the discourse" and that "(a)ll that has been said about a discourse object contributes towards its meaning" (Teubert 2007: 68). For integration this means that whatever has been said about it in one language will add to and be reflected in the meaning of the word.. We understand DKWs as lexical items (see Schröter & Storjohann 2015) a) that occur frequently especially in periods of salience of the discourse it belongs to (e.g., austerity in the discourse about the financial crisis since 2008) b) that function as semantic nodes in discourses which upon deeper analysis of their contexts of usage unravel a part of the history and ideology of the underlying discourse c) that are usually part of an ensemble of other lexical items that feature prominently in the same discourse; typically there are a number of DKWs (e.g. in discourses about migration: multicultural society, integration, communities) and they might be associated with certain points of view (e.g.…”