Language and Power in Czech Corpora

The author focuses on quantitatively examining the linguistic other- ing in printed media discourse in the Czech Republic, using the Czech National Corpus. The method used so far has been a corpus-based discourse analysis based on the adjectives preceding the keywords for each part of the project, now moving on to include reporting verbs. The theoretical starting point is that power relations in a society are reflected in that society’s mainstream media, and that the language usage in these media contributes to the worldview of its recipients, in some cases even helps to construct it. Frequent but widely dis- persed stereotypical and negative phrases and collocations are examples of a power language that may not be visible at once, but slowly enters the general discourse in a society. This project aims to survey these linguistic othering phrases in the Czech media discourse, as comprehensively as possible, and shed some light on their appearance over time.