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In:Political Discourse in Central, Eastern and Balkan Europe
Edited by Martina Berrocal and Aleksandra Salamurović
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 84] 2019
► pp. 93–118

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Chapter 5
More than keywords

Discourse prominence analysis of the Russian Web Portal Sputnik Czech Republic

Published online: 23 July 2019
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.84.05cvr
Abstract
The interpretation of a text usually starts with finding what is striking. Keyword analysis is a widely used corpus linguistic method that helps identify words as possible carriers of prominent topics in a text. It identifies words with significantly higher relative frequency in a target text when compared with a reference corpus. However, as our analysis of the Russian opinion portal Sputnik Czech Republic reveals, examining keywords alone does not produce an explicit account of discourse ideology in a text. Focusing predominantly on the image of Russia reflected in Sputnik, this study not only demonstrates the importance of a multi-level, quantitative approach to text, but also the importance of discourse functions of morphosyntactic units.
Article outline
  • 1.Keywords as a starting point for discourse analysis
  • 2.Multi-level discourse prominence analysis
  • 3.Data and interpretation
    • 3.0Corpora used
    • 3.1Highly ranked prominent lemmas
    • 3.2Groups of prominent lemmas
    • 3.3Prominent inflected nominal forms of a lemma
    • 3.4Prominent sentences
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Corpus resources used
  • Appendix
References (29)
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Corpus resources used
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Cited by six other publications

Elmerot, Irene
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Janda, Laura A., Masako Fidler, Václav Cvrček & Anna Obukhova
2023. The case for case in Putin’s speeches. Russian Linguistics 47:1 ► pp. 15 ff. DOI logo
Cvrček, Václav & Masako Fidler
2022. No keyword is an island: in search of covert associations. Corpora 17:2 ► pp. 259 ff. DOI logo
Berrocal, Martina
2019. Constructing threat through quotes and historical analogies in the Czech and the US “Ukraine Discourse”. Journal of Language and Politics 18:6 ► pp. 870 ff. DOI logo
Berrocal, Martina
2023. Presidential Speeches as Modus Operandi for the State- and Nation-Building. In Konzepte der NATION im europäischen Kontext im 21. Jahrhundert [Linguistik in Empirie und Theorie/Empirical and Theoretical Linguistics, ], ► pp. 25 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2024. Frequency, Dispersion, Association, and Keyness [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 115], DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 8 december 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

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