Corpus Analysis of Political Language

Abstract

Politics is a commerce whose currency is language. This entry indicates some of the advantages of corpus‐assisted approaches in analyzing a wide variety of different kinds of political discourse, both spoken and written. Some of the potential sources of data are listed and different sorts of corpus‐assisted research and the different kinds of research questions which have been addressed are categorized. There are at least two distinct types of research objective. One type of research is overtly engaged with the political, social, and cultural aspects of the set of texts under study and attempts to uncover nonobvious ideological meanings and messages they may contain. The ultimate aim of this sort of activist research is political action and social change. It looks at issues of perceived social injustice and how empowered groups use language to construct and maintain dominance over disempowered groups. The second type of political language research is similar in its aims to discourse and conversation analysis and uses corpus techniques to investigate a particular political or institutional discourse type, exactly as with any exemplar of discourse, to uncover and analyze nonobvious patterns of language or aspects of linguistic interaction. These researchers place their priority in description and analysis of political language as interesting in its own right. Though not necessarily uninterested in social action, their philosophy is perhaps summarized as: If you want to change the world, first you must understand it.

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