Ways of Expressing Anxiety in the German Press on the Example of the Lexeme “Angst”

The article deals with the study of neurosogenic themes that reflect anxiety in German society. The paper examines the contextualization of fear on the basis of a number of sources, taking into account the temporal scope. The analysis was based on the representative Timestamped JSI German corpus, containing news articles from German-language papers published in 2014–2021 and from which five sub-corpora with 373 million tokens were built. The sources represent both the general German press (“Bild”, “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”) and localized publications from different regions of the Federal Republic of Germany (“Coburger Tageblatt”, “Schwarzwälder Bote”, “Stuttgarter Zeitung”). Using a corpus-driven analysis, we identified lexemes occurring with the lexeme «Angst», thus outlining the range of topics that cause anxiety in German society. Both topics those common to the press as a whole (terrorism and war, foreigners and xenophobia, the economy, the future, etc.) and those that turn out to be unique to a particular publication or occur in several of them were identified. The ANOVA has shown that there are statistically significant differences in the use of the lexeme «Angst» in different sources and time periods of text writing. The results showed that anxiety is prevalent in large German newspapers, i.e. the topics covered in these publications are relevant to the problems of foreign and domestic policy, while in the local press the focus is shifted towards everyday issues. From 2014 to 2021, we observe spikes of anxiety recorded in the newspapers related to the current news agenda. The largest number of examples dealing with fears relates, in general, to the year 2020, marked by the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, it was shown that different semantic potencies of the word «Angst» are actualized depending on different prepositional objects.

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