Economic terms in the news during the Great Recession

Abstract

This book explores the evolution of sentiment in economic terms in the press during financial crises applying a combination of sentiment analysis techniques and usage fluctuation analysis on a diachronic corpus derived from editorials in quality newspapers during the Great Recession. The book uncovers two key findings: first, certain economic terms become event words during times of crisis due to their increased use in the press and the general public, revealing rapid semantic changes in economic terms caused by major socio-economic events. Second, sentiment-laden collocations are found to be influenced by culture, highlighting language’s adaptability to financial upheavals. This work proposes an innovative methodology that combines lexicon-based Sentiment Analysis, Corpus Linguistics, and qualitative Discourse Analysis to shed light on how language shapes economic discourse, making it a valuable resource for scholars exploring the relationship between language and historic events.