Contrastive analysis of keywords in discourses

This article suggests a theoretical and methodological framework for a systematic contrastive discourse analysis across languages and discourse communities through keywords. This constitutes a lexical approach to discourse analysis which is considered to be particularly fruitful for comparative analysis. We use a corpus-assisted methodology, presuming meaning to be constituted, revealed, and constrained by collocation environment. We compare the use of the keywords integration / Integration in French and German public discourses about migration on the basis of newspaper corpora built from two French and German newspapers from 1998 to 2011. We look at the frequency of these keywords over the given time span, group collocates into thematic categories, and discuss indicators of discursive salience by comparing the development of collocation profiles over time in both corpora as well as the occurrence of neologisms and compounds based on integration / Integration .