Dirtbags, Drunkards and Miniature Mutes: Czech Subjectivity Revealed Through Corpus-Based Discourse Analysis

ABSTRACT

Language may be seen as a tool for constructing and confirming power structures, and a corpus analysis of adjacent words may reveal how individuals or groups of people other than the sender (writer or speaker) are depicted. These depictions frequently reveal a phenomenon known as linguistic othering. The aim of this paper is to present a corpus-based survey of the linguistic othering of Roma, Vietnamese and Ukrainian people in Czech media discourse from 1989 to 2014. The representative result is acquired by comparing neutral, positive and negative adjectives related to the three key lemmata, and a quantitative method is used to answer analytical questions about the query words in this context. Although some previous researchers have used similar methods, it appears that no such study has been performed on such a large body of material for Slavic languages. The outcome reveals how these three groups are differentiated in text, and the source material helps to demonstrate how language usage reflects the discourse of Czech society.

KEYWORDS:

• corpus analysis
• othering
• discourse analysis
• Czech media
• stereotypes
• frequency analysis

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the reviewers and editors of this article for valuable comments, as well as my supervisor Tora Hedin for guiding me through the mazes to get here, and finally professor Klas Rönnbäck for invaluable help with the statistics and structure.

ORCID

Irene Elmerot http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9809-8207

Notes

1 This article is a revised and updated version of a Stockholm university thesis from 2017 (see Elmerot 2017). Translations of Czech words into English are by the author.

2 https://www.czso.cz/documents/11292/27914491/1512_c01t01.pdf/7e9ea54d-13c8-4a41-bffa-bfe518d66ddc?version=1.0

3 The actual number of Roma persons in the Czech Republic is not clear. http://www.romea.cz/en/news/czech/patrik-banga-i-m-for-collecting-ethnic-data-in-all-areas-but-the-majority-can-t-tell-who-is-romani-2.

4 http://wiki.korpus.cz/doku.php/en:cnk:syn:verze4 – there is now a newer version available, but version 4 was the newest during the research for this article.