Skandalisierung korpuslinguistisch. Ein empirisch-linguistischer Blick auf die Berichterstattung zur "Wulff-Affäre"

Abstract

What kind of language is typical of the mass media coverage of a scandal? Which linguistic means have the effect of scandalizing a public person like a politician? The study presented in this paper uses corpus linguistic methods to investigate a specific scandal in recent German politics: Federal President Christian Wulff was accused by the media of not having informed transparently about a private loan he had taken out. Further allegations of corruption presented by the media resulted in his resignation after only two months. The paper shows how automatic language pattern analyses of a corpus of articles about Wulff in two leading German newspapers reveal the typical patterns used in a discourse of scandalization. Additionally, also characteristic grammar features like tempus forms are incorporated in the analysis. The texts scandalizing a person use more patterned language than other news texts on politics. The patterns reflect the characteristic speech acts of scandalizing like accusing, informing, or speculating on the political future of the scandalized person, but also speech acts like defending and regretting. The use of tempus shows that scandalizing texts are more dynamic and vivid compared to other political coverage.