Discourse and 'democracy': some signals from the South African corpus of English

Abstract

Public discourse is replete with terms whose meaning is contested in the service of competing ideologies. In the discourse of the 'new' South Africa, as attested by a recently compiled corpus, the term 'democracy' is found to represent at least three conceptions: (1) a doctrine of equality in human rights and in personal and civil liberties; ( 2 ) a political system of 'majority rule' by means of a secure electoral machinery with multiple parties and universal voting rights; and (3) an economic system of free enterprise and equal opportunity in the economy and the job market. These are plainly incompatible, and, as the data show, the third one is currently undermining the first.

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