Spirals of Signification? A Corpus Linguistic Analysis of the German Doping Discourse

Abstract

Based on the idea that the political success of the anti-doping movement might be reflected in an increasing moralization of media discourses, the article traces long-term trends in the German doping discourse. Thus, a unique text corpus covering the period between 1950 and 2009 is analyzed using a corpus linguistic (CL) approach. It is shown that attention for doping has heavily increased and that doping has been marked as a persistent and widespread problem subject to permanent efforts of mitigation. However, there is little evidence for more alarmist moralizations. While quantitative CL techniques proved useful for tracing long-term changes in language use, assessing the role of media within the political economy of the moral regulation of doping requires a more ambitious mix of quantitative and qualitative methods. Nevertheless, the use of CL by scholars of sport communication is recommended, as CL methods are able to process large amounts of digitized data and are quite flexible in theoretical terms.