Open Access

Daniel H. Gross

• Drawing from a large-scale research project on the discursive construction of ordinariness, this dissertation examines the discursive construction of the socio-cognitive construct of ordinary people to determine discourse community-specific differences in emerging semantic preferences, semantic prosodies and discursive prosodies. Using a mixed-method approach that incorporates NLP, corpus linguistic and discourse pragmatic frameworks, it analyzes corpora of German and British-English broadsheet newspaper articles and their comments on social media leading up to and after elections with the assistance of WordNet, GermaNet, SenticNet and positioning theory. The contrastive analysis of the data examined reveals a broad range of semantic preferences with an emphasis on semantic categories of cognition, information and geography in the British-English data, while the German data is revealed to be more constrained to the referential domain of nationality. Semantic prosodies of ordinary andDrawing from a large-scale research project on the discursive construction of ordinariness, this dissertation examines the discursive construction of the socio-cognitive construct of ordinary people to determine discourse community-specific differences in emerging semantic preferences, semantic prosodies and discursive prosodies. Using a mixed-method approach that incorporates NLP, corpus linguistic and discourse pragmatic frameworks, it analyzes corpora of German and British-English broadsheet newspaper articles and their comments on social media leading up to and after elections with the assistance of WordNet, GermaNet, SenticNet and positioning theory. The contrastive analysis of the data examined reveals a broad range of semantic preferences with an emphasis on semantic categories of cognition, information and geography in the British-English data, while the German data is revealed to be more constrained to the referential domain of nationality. Semantic prosodies of ordinary and its functional synonyms are shown to be neutral to negative-leaning in German, whereas the British-English data produces neutral to positive-leaning sentiments. Ordinary people and its functional synoyms are shown to be positioned by the journalists as victims of elite politicians in the British-English context and as victims of (political) institutions in German. The effect of these strategic negative evaluations is an accusatory communicative performance by British-English commenters towards the (political) elite, which German commenters are shown to be less prone to. The results highlight the need for an integrated approach to discursive prosody to not only identify context-dependent particularities but also enable generalizations across discourse domains.…