Alexander Ziem

Wie über Krisen geredet wird. Einige Ergebnisse eines diskursgeschichtlichen Forschungsprojekts

In this article, we report on basic findings of a discourse-historical study on linguistic constructions of economic and social-political ›crises‹ in Germany from 1973 to 2009. The study is based on a text corpus comprising approximately 11,000 newspaper articles that address one of the following ›crises‹ in Germany: (a) the ›oil crisis‹ in 1973/1974, (b) the so-called ›party political turnaround‹ in 1982, (c) the ›labor market crisis‹ in 1997, (d) the ›Agenda 2010‹ in 2003, and (e) the ›financial crisis‹ in 2008/2009. The guiding hypothesis is that the way we talk about crises, and thus linguistically conceptualize the phenomena addressed, substantially shapes the way we think and envision facets of crises. Employing both data-driven methods of corpus analysis and interpretative techniques in the domain of content analysis, we (a) systematically compare the vocabulary of the crises in terms of their specific and shared lexis, (b) provide detailed, frame-based investigations of important key words, and (c) highlight and analyze significant discourse-specific metaphors as well as argument patterns. Overall, the results obtained contribute to a more comprehensive account of a contemporary history of public language use in German.