A corpus-linguistic analysis of the Agrokomerc scandal based on newspaper articles from Politika

Abstract

The main purpose of this case study is to describe how corruption scandals; its actors and actions are linguistically conceptualized by the Serbian public word usage. The Agrokomerc scandal that was investigated from 1987 to 1989 in former Yugoslavia will serve as an example to show what kind of vocabulary as well as discourse-specific metaphors were used to describe the corruption scandal in the Serbian mass media. For this purpose, a text corpus was created that contains 137 articles from the Serbian newspaper Politika. The selected articles address the corruption scandal “Agrokomerc”. Data-driven, corpus linguistic methods will be used for this case study. This method enables the identification of concrete lexical units that can be further interpreted and used in a wider and interdisciplinary context.