Identifying discourse patterns in social media comments on “politically correct” language

Abstract

AbstractThis paper presents an analysis of online comments on German newspaper articles dealing with non-discriminating language use. Combining bottom-up quantitative methods with qualitative analyses allows for identifying recurrent discourse patterns as well as typical narratives that play a role in this debate. I argue that if a major goal of critical cognitive linguistics is to reach out to the general public, understanding the appeal of such narratives (which are, obviously, often factually wrong) is just as important as identifying and refuting them.