"All this is a boon to Britain's crumbling democracy": meta-reporting about the TV-debates in the British General Election 2015

This contribution deals with meta-reporting in the 2015 British election campaign. First, the concept of mediatisation and the consequences of mediatisation for political communication will be discussed more generally. Second, the concept of meta-reporting will be introduced as both symptom and consequence of an increased degree of mediatised political communication. Thirdly, based on previous findings, a qualitative analysis of newspaper reporting on the four TV debates during the 2015 election campaign exhibits various elements of meta-reporting. Meta-reporting about these media-initiated and mediatised communicative events includes (a) reporting about spin doctoring, image work and strategies for self-representation of political actors, (b) discussing the media format itself and the media actors involved in them, and (c) the effect of the TV debates on the audience and on voting behaviour. The analysis of meta-reporting about the TV debates indicates both a de-politicisation of political agency and a politicisation of media agency

How words behave in other languages: the use of German Nazi vocabulary in English

This paper undertakes a systematic investigation into the use of German Nazi vocabulary in English. Nazi vocabulary is checked for frequency of occurrence in a large webcorpus of English and then, where it occurs, for reference to Nazi discourse. Next, its frequency is compared to equivalent French and German webcorpora, showing whether or not the use of Nazi vocabulary outside German is unique to English and whether or not its current usage differs between German and the borrowing languages. Finally, the use of two words that occur with similar frequency in all three languages – judenrein and Blitzkrieg – and of two words that occur with the highest difference in frequency – Anschluss and Lebensraum – is investigated in detail by means of the Sketch Engine corpus tool, including analysis of collocations which indicate contexts of usage. The results can inform further research into lexical borrowing by demonstrating that borrowed words may be used in ways that differ notably from their use in the donor language

Contrastive analysis of keywords in discourses: intégration and integration in French and German discourses about migration

This article suggests a theoretical and methodological framework for a systematic contrastive discourse analysis across languages and discourse communities through keywords, constituting a lexical approach to discourse analysis which is considered to be particularly fruitful for comparative analysis. We use a corpus assisted methodology, presuming meaning to be constituted, revealed and constrained by collocation environment. We compare the use of the keyword intégration and Integration in French and German public discourses about migration on the basis of newspaper corpora built from two French and German newspapers from 1998 to 2011. We look at the frequency of these keywords over the given time span, group collocates into thematic categories and discuss indicators of discursive salience by comparing the development of collocation profiles over time in both corpora as well as the occurrence of neologisms and compounds based on intégration/Integration

'Einfach wieder offen reden?' Populistische Diskursmanöver und Anti-political-correctness rechter Parteien in Deutschland und Großbritannien

Dieser Beitrag beschäftigt sich mit dem Anti-political-correctness-Diskurs deutscher und britischer Parteien und mit der Frage, inwieweit es sich dabei um einen populistischen Diskurs handelt. (Rechts-)populistische Elemente des Anti-pc-Diskurses finden sich in der Behauptung, pc werde von Eliten perpetuiert und ‚das einfache Volk‘ dabei an der freien Rede gehindert und in der Konstruktion eines durch pc bedrohten 'Heartlands' sowie in der Darstellung von pc als irrational und krankhaft. Durch den vergleichenden Blick auf die britische und die deutsche Rechte wird gleichzeitig empirisch verdeutlicht, dass Anti-pc als zentrales diskursstrategisches Manöver eine wichtige Rolle im Diskurs der politischen Rechten spielt. Bei der Analyse zeigt sich auch, dass Anti-pc sich kaum auf konkreten Sprachgebrauch bezieht, sondern auf den öffentlich-politischen Diskurs als solchen und auf Fragen politischer und kultureller Repräsentation

Speaking up and being heard: the changing metadiscourse about ‘voice’ in British parliamentary debates since 1800

As a metaphor for political power, participation, and legitimacy, the concept of ‘voice’ is central to considerations of representative politics during the modern era. Little is known about how political actors themselves understood and referred to their own voices, those of others, and their respective significance for representative politics. This article focuses on the British Parliament, which was since the eighteenth century regarded as a paradigmatic incarnation of political voice and as the pinnacle of modern representative government. Based on a corpus of Hansard debates from 1800 to 2005, we analyse MPs’ explicit references to ‘voice’ in parliamentary debates. We aim to explore the salience of ‘voice’ for MPs and of different aspects of voice as a vehicle for expressing political will. We also shed light on how metadiscursive references to ‘voice’ change over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries