Are We on Our Own or Pressed into ein Kollektiv? The Keyword Pragmatic Trajectory in the German Public and Political Discourse: Corpus-Driven Discourse Analysis

Abstract

This study investigates the semantics and pragmatics of the German keyword “Kollektiv” based on its actual uses in public discourse and by political actors. “Kollektiv” is regarded as a concept of greatsocial significance, yet it is also a most controversial notion. It relates to the universal values and benefits of collectivism such as mutual assistance, solidarity, effective cooperation when coping with difficulties, mutual support and sympathy. However, otherfeatures of collectivism such as having to integrate oneself into the community, setting equal boundaries for individuals, and invading people’s privacy activate negative meanings. This governs the evaluation-based polysemy of the keyword. The explanatory approach in this paper was formulated against the background of deontic meaning as a basic concept in semantics to analyze social evaluation of salient lexis. On par with their descriptive meaning, keywords have a deontic meaning component that their denotational interpretability depends on.The study was carried out as corpus-driven discourse analytical research. Discourse analysis proceeded as noncritical linguistic discourse analysis. To provide a functional perspective on Kollektiv, the “Digital Dictionary of the German Language” / “Das Digitale Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache” was used with its two sections of dictionaries and text corpora. Two specialized corpora from the “Digital dictionary” were employed: the “Corona corpus” that contains electronic texts with over 50 mln tokens on the coronavirus pandemic, and the corpus “Political Speeches” containing records of proceedings of the government bodies of German-speaking countries and regions as well as transcripts of oral speeches delivered by politicians. We show that the word “Kollektiv”is employed both as description and as evaluation setting up both positive and negative deontics. The deontic polysemy of “Kollektiv” is activated in contextual uses. The conducted study addresses the way in which linguistic forms get integrated in larger activities in the social world and how, through salient lexicalizations in discourse, they open up the perspective to social diversity and polyphony.

Keywords

• Kollektiv
• deontic meaning
• corpus-driven discourse analysis
• coronavirus pandemic discourse
• political discourse

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