Migration of n-grams and concgrams in political speeches

This paper investigates phrases and clusters, here termed also n-grams and concgrams, in politics, more specifically in American, British and Italian political spoken discourse. In particular the study focuses on two tri-grams, one occurring both in highly formal but also informal speeches and one typical of impromptu language: fight against terrorism and connect the dots. Firstly, the origin of the cluster is examined, then the extent to which it has migrated into other cultures: a diachronic study demonstrates in fact that Italian politicians who hardly uttered the word guerra in the vicinity of terrorismo are now frequently using the phrase guerra al terrorismo, whereas in the past lotta al terrorismo was the only choice; it is here argued that this may be attributed to the strong influence of the American war on terror. The paper discusses also how the cluster connect the dots, very surprisingly, has migrated from American into Italian spoken discourse more readily than into British spoken discourse, carrying within itself the same negative semantic prosody. The corpus was interrogated by ConcGram 1.0 (Greaves), a software able to handle positional variation (AB, BA), namely when the associated words occur in different position relative to one another, and constituency variation (AB, ACB), namely when one or more words occur in between the associated words (Cheng, Greaves and Warren). Such searches have proved to be an invaluable aid to uncover the full extent of the idiom principle (Sinclair 1991)