Analyzing Political Discourse: Finding the Frames for Guilt and Responsibility

This paper deals with the analysis of political discourse in Croatia, more precisely, it aims to determine how dissatisfaction is expressed with the attitudes represented by political rivals. We focus on the detection of linguistic means used to show disagreement with decisions or actions taken by parties or individuals considered political and/or ideological opponents. We are particularly interested in the means used by speakers to indicate that someone has failed to do something that is under his/her responsibility and is, therefore, guilty of this omission. In other words, we want to determine how the concept of responsibility is lexicalized, how it is signaled that there is a failure in someone’s responsibility, and, finally, that someone is therefore to be blamed for that omission or even transgression. For this purpose, we use a large corpus of texts, with over 127 million tokens, consisting of transcripts of plenary debates from the Croatian Parliament since 2003. We use NooJ for the construction of a set of rules that aim to detect the usage of the Croatian lexemes odgovornost [responsibility] and krivnja [guilt] in this corpus. Since Croatian is rich in terms of word formation, a set of rules is designed to capture the usage of derived words morphologically related to these nouns. In data analysis, we take into account the political orientation of MPs, i.e. their affiliation with left, right, or centrist parties, the usage of various linguistic constructions/frames related to responsibility and guilt as well as periods in which they were used.