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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
  • Appendix
Published online: 23 July 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.84.05cvr
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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: [URL])
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Cited by (5)

Cited by five other publications

Janda, Laura A., Masako Fidler, Václav Cvrček & Anna Obukhova
2023. The case for case in Putin’s speeches. Russian Linguistics 47:1 ► pp. 15 ff. DOI logo
Cvrček, Václav & Masako Fidler
2022. No keyword is an island: in search of covert associations. Corpora 17:2 ► pp. 259 ff. DOI logo
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. DOI logo
Berrocal, Martina
2023. Presidential Speeches as Modus Operandi for the State- and Nation-Building. In Konzepte der NATION im europäischen Kontext im 21. Jahrhundert [Linguistik in Empirie und Theorie/Empirical and Theoretical Linguistics, ], ► pp. 25 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2024. Frequency, Dispersion, Association, and Keyness [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 115], DOI logo

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