Two centuries of 'security': Semantic variation in the State of the Union address (1790-2014)

This chapter makes a diachronic study of the word 'security' as used in State of Union addresses from 1790 to 2014, through a corpus assisted discourse analysis of meaning-making. It illustrates variations in relative frequencies over time and identifies four semantic categories of security: financial, national, international and social. Moreover it oberves the increase in the construal of hybrid categories of securit