Diskurswandel korpuspragmatisch aufspüren

Analyse- und Visualisierungsmethoden im Kontext der data philology

Abstract

This article presents an approach for tracing discursive change in text corpora by combining methods from corpus pragmatics, visual linguistics, and data philology. Using a corpus of more than two million Swiss newspaper articles in German and published between 2000 and 2024, we show how dispersion measures, keyness analysis, collocation profiling, and temporally aligned word embeddings (TWEC) can be brought together within a modular analytical and visualization toolbox which we call Visual Corpus Pragmatics. In our perspective, visualizations serve not only as illustrations but as epistemic instruments which make semantic and pragmatic shifts empirically visible and open for interpretation. The approach is based on an interplay between quantitative procedures and hermeneutic reading, resulting in a reflexive and methodologically transparent framework for investigating discourse in its historical and social context.