Kind of a Message: Corpus Linguistic Analyses of the 2009 Bundestag Elections

Selected results from corpus-based & corpus-driven political tracker analyses of speeches by Angela Merkel & Frank-Walter Steinmeier -- the principal political actors, protagonists, & antagonists -- in the 2009 German parliamentary elections are produced by a research group at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies. After specifying the type of texts & speeches included into the corpus & briefly describing the "semantic-matrix-analysis" methodology, key words, parts of speech, address forms, formulaic phrases, deictic expressions, collocations, & syntactic patterns are identified in Merkel's & Steinmeier's political rhetoric; collocations for Staat 'state' are computed for speeches by Oskar Lafontaine & Guido Westerwelle, the former representing Die Linke (The Left), the latter the Freie Demokratische Partei ([FDP] Free Democrats Party). The semantic categories of collocated lexemes are also studied to determine the rhetorical-stylistic differences between these politicians; results for intensifiers are briefly discussed. Differences in appealing to facts vs emotions are detected in Merkel's & Steinmeier's speeches & arguments. Z. Dubiel