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
References
Baker, Paul
2005 The Public Discourse of Gay Men. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
2009 “The Question is, How Cruel Is It? Keywords in Debates on Fox Hunting in the British House of Commons.” In What’s in a Word-list? ed. by Dawn Archer, 125–136. Farnham: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Baker, Paul and Tony McEnery
2005 “A Corpus-based Approach to Discourse of Refugees and Asylum Seekers in UN and Newspaper Texts.” Journal of Language and Politics 4 (2): 197–226. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bertels, Ann and Dirk Speelman
2013 “ ‘Keywords Method’ versus ‘Calcul des Spécificités’.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 18 (4): 536–560. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan
2002 “Computers, Language and Characterisation. An Analysis of Six Characters in Romeo and Juliet.” In Conversation in Life and in Literature: Papers from the ASLA Symposium, ed. by Ulla Melander-Marttala, Carin Ostman, and Merja Kyto, 11–30. Uppsala: Association Suedoise de Linguistique Appliqee.Google Scholar
2009 “Keyness: Words, Part-of-speech and Semantic Categories in the Character-talk of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 14 (1): 29–59. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan, and Jane Demmen
2015 “Keywords.” In The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics, ed. by Douglas Biber and Randi Reppen, 90–105. Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cvrček, Václav, Vilém Kodýtek, Marie Kopřivová, Dominika Kováříková, Petr Sgall, Michal Šulc, Jan Táborský, Jan Volín, and Martina Waclawičová
2010 [2015] Mluvnice současné češtiny [Grammar of Contemporary Czech]. Prague: Karolinum.Google Scholar
Fidler, Masako, and Václav Cvrček
2015a “A Data-Driven Analysis of Reader Viewpoint: Reconstructing the Historical Reader Using Keyword Analysis.” Journal of Slavic Linguistics 23 (2): 197–239. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2015b “What Grammatical Morphemes Tell us about Discourse: A Key “morph” Analysis of Czech Presidential Speeches.” (http://​www​.brown​.edu​/research​/projects​/needle​-in​-haystack​/sites​/brown​.edu​.research​.projects​.needle​-in​-haystack​/files​/uploads​/ICLC2015​-FINAL​.pdf) Presented at the International Cognitive Linguistics Conference. Northumbria, UK.
2018 “Going Beyond “Aboutness”: A Quantitative Analysis of Sputnik Czech Republic.” In Taming the Corpus. From Inflection and Lexis to Interpretation, ed. by Masako Fidler, and Václav Cvrček, 195–225. Cham:Springer. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Firth, John R.
1935 “Technique of Semantics.” Transactions of the philological society 34: 36–73. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Fisher-Starcke, Bettina
2009 “Keywords and Frequent Phrases of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. A Corpus-Stylistic Analysis.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics. 14 (4), 492–523. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Janda, Laura A., and Charles E. Townsend
2002 Czech. (Available at www​.seelrc​.org:8080​/grammar​/pdf​/stand​_alone​_czech​.pdf accessed March 1, 2016.)
Mahlberg, Michaela
2007 “Clusters, Key Clusters and Local Textual Functions in Dickens.” Corpora 2 (1): 1–31. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Popescu, Ioan-Iovitz, Karl-Heinz Best, and Gabriel Altmann
2007 “On the Dynamics of Word Classes in Texts.” Glottometrics 14: 58–71.Google Scholar
Rayson, Paul
2008 “From Key Words to Key Semantic Domains.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics. 13 (4): 519–549. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Scott, Mike
2010 “Problems in Investigating Keyness, or Cleansing the Undergrowth and Marking out Tails…” In Keyness in Texts, ed. by Marina Bondi, and Mike Scott, 43–57. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
1999 WordSmith Tools Help Manual. Version 3.0. Oxford, UK: Mike Scott and Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
2013 WordSmith Tools Manual. Version 7.0. Liverpool: Lexical Analysis Software. (Available at www​.lexically​.net​/downloads).
Scott, Mike, and Christopher Tribble
2006 Key Words and Corpus Analysis in Language Education. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Stubbs, Michael
2005 “Conrad in the Computer: Examples of Quantitative Stylistic Methods.” Language and Literature 14 (1): 5–24. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Tabbert, Ulrike
2015 Crime and corpus. The Linguistic Representation of Crime in the Press. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Walker, Brian
2010 “Wmatrix, Key Concepts and the Narrator in Julian Barnes’s Talking it Over.” In Language and Style, ed. by Beatrix Busse, and Dan McIntyre, 364–387. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Williams, Raymond
1976 Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Wilson, Andrew
2013 “Embracing Bayes Factors for Key Item Analysis in Corpus Linguistics.” In New Approaches to the Study of Linguistic Variability, ed. by Markus Bieswanger and Amei Koll-Stobbe, 3–11. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Wilson, Andrew, and Jenny Thomas
1997 “Semantic Annotation,” In Corpus Annotation: Linguistic Information from Computer Texts, ed. by Roger Garside, Geffrey Leech, and Tony McEnery, 55–65. London: Longman.Google Scholar

Corpus resources used

Křen, M., V. Cvrček, T. Čapka, A. Čermáková, M. Hnátková, M. L. Chlumská, T. Jelínek, D. Kováříková, V. Petkevič, P. Procházka, H. Skoumalová, M. Škrabal, P. Truneček, P. Vondřička, and A. Zasina
2015 SYN2015: Reprezentativní korpus psané češtiny. [SYN2015: Representative Corpus of Contemporary Written Czech]. Institute of the Czech National Corpus, Charles University in Prague 2015. (Available at: http://​www​.korpus​.cz)
Straka, Milan, and Jana Straková
2014 MorphoDiTa: Morphological Dictionary and Tagger. LINDAT/CLARIN digital library at Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics, Charles University in Prague. (Available at http://​hdl​.handle​.net​/11858​/00​-097C​-0000​-0023​-43CD​-0).
Cited by

Cited by 3 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
Cvrček, Václav & Masako Fidler
2022. No keyword is an island: in search of covert associations. Corpora 17:2 ► pp. 259 ff. Crossref logo
Janda, Laura A., Masako Fidler, Václav Cvrček & Anna Obukhova
2022. The case for case in Putin’s speeches. Russian Linguistics Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 05 december 2022. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.