Chapter published in:
Political Discourse in Central, Eastern and Balkan Europe
Edited by Martina Berrocal and Aleksandra Salamurović
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 84] 2019
► pp. 93–118

Chapter 5
More than keywords

Discourse prominence analysis of the Russian Web Portal Sputnik Czech Republic

The interpretation of a text usually starts with finding what is striking. Keyword analysis is a widely used corpus linguistic method that helps identify words as possible carriers of prominent topics in a text. It identifies words with significantly higher relative frequency in a target text when compared with a reference corpus. However, as our analysis of the Russian opinion portal Sputnik Czech Republic reveals, examining keywords alone does not produce an explicit account of discourse ideology in a text. Focusing predominantly on the image of Russia reflected in Sputnik, this study not only demonstrates the importance of a multi-level, quantitative approach to text, but also the importance of discourse functions of morphosyntactic units.
Keywords: discourse analysis, keyword analysis, ideology, corpus linguistics, Czech, Russia, Eastern Europe
Article outline
  • 1.Keywords as a starting point for discourse analysis
  • 2.Multi-level discourse prominence analysis
  • 3.Data and interpretation
    • 3.0Corpora used
    • 3.1Highly ranked prominent lemmas
    • 3.2Groups of prominent lemmas
    • 3.3Prominent inflected nominal forms of a lemma
    • 3.4Prominent sentences
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Corpus resources used
Published online: 23 July 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.84.05cvr
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Corpus resources used

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Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Berrocal, Martina
2019. Constructing threat through quotes and historical analogies in the Czech and the US “Ukraine Discourse”. Journal of Language and Politics 18:6 ► pp. 870 ff. Crossref logo

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