‘Risk’ in political discourse. A corpus approach to semantic change in German Bundestag debates

Abstract

Our paper presents a diachronic corpus linguistic approach to the conceptualisation and framing of ‘risk’ in German parliamentary discourse. We analyse all occurrences of risk based on the complete collection of plenary protocols of the German Bundestag covering the legislative periods 1–18 (1949–2017). We apply methods used in Digital Discourse Analysis to show how the concept of ‘risk’ changes through time. Therefore, we investigate co-occurrences to find typical collocations and contexts. We measured three peaks: the first in the late 1950s, the second from the 1970s onwards, and the third in the first decade of the new millennium. We show that ‘risk’ as a negative and ‘chance’ as a positive concept have partly taken the communicative place of ‘danger’ and ‘possibility’. The collocates of risk that can be related to different knowledge domains increase until 2009. This hints at the growing importance of risk thematizations in more and more thematic contexts. Technology and economics turn out to be the most important of these contexts. The analysis shows a clear tendency towards a negative and rather generic use of the word risk. Our results provide for the first time a data-driven insight into the long-term development of the ‘risk’ concept in political discourse of the Federal Republic of Germany.