Conference Agenda

Introduction

This paper draws from two distinct research projects in text mining, each exploring the use of concepts and shifts in historical meaning, albeit within different contexts and with diverse inquiries. One project, ‘Terrorism in Swedish Politics’ (2020–2026, see Edlund et al. 2022), examines the framing of political terror within parliamentary discourse 1968–2018, while the other ‘The Market Language’ (2022–2025, see Ohlsson et al. 2022) investigates the discourse surrounding markets, spanning from the Middle Ages to contemporary times. However, despite having disparate focuses, previous results from both projects strongly suggest that compound words and compound neologisms play a significant role in the formation and development of different political discourses.

Hence, the overarching aim of this project-wide paper is to explore and showcase the analytical significance of compounds in navigating new concepts and phenomena within parliamentary discourse. More specifically, we argue that employing corpus linguistic methods in conjunction with conceptual history perspectives to text mining of compounds is an underdeveloped analytical approach in historical text analysis, exemplifying its relevance with two case studies of the transformations of the concepts of market and terror, respectively, based on Swedish parliamentary datasets. Drawing upon a combination of distant and close reading, we will describe patterns of compound use in the data sets at hand, and examine the context of the compounds in a more nuanced way, deepening the historical contextualization of the significance of compounds in concept development.

The analytical significance of compounds

The ‘Terrorism in Swedish Politics’ and ‘The Market Language’ projects are multidisciplinary endeavours that integrate analytical methods for processing large textual datasets with inquiries into actual language usage and the utilisation of particular concepts within the political texts under examination. In this sense, the two projects follow previous research that have explored the development of key concepts in Swedish parliamentary datasets, drawing upon the application of statistical measurements (Jarlbrink et al. 2022; Norén et al. 2022).

However, the present paper will specifically focus on the analytical work in the two projects that concern compound neologisms, framing the issue in the wider context of how multi-word phrases are expressed in different languages. N-grams often serve as a widely accepted method for describing recurrent multi-word combinations in natural language, both in spoken and written discourse, and are frequently employed as units of analysis in numerous studies (Lyse & Andersen 2012). N-grams are a useful tool to map recurring multi-word combinations but do not capture the word combination potential and possibility to easily create neologisms that occur in Swedish. Notably, the creation of new words through the synthetic amalgamation of different terms into compounds, functioning as cohesive lexical units, is a distinctive morphological trait of the Swedish language (Finkbeiner and Schlücker 2019). While similar morphological patterns can be observed in other Germanic languages, including the Nordic languages, Dutch and English, the latter is characterised by fuzzy boundaries between compounds and multi-word expressions (Bauer 2019). This is reflected in irregularities when it comes to the spelling of English compounds; these are often represented orthographically as separate lexical units (c.f. English compound labour market and its Swedish equivalent arbetsmarknad). Orthographic irregularities of this kind considerably narrow the potential of detecting compounds computationally on the basis of large datasets. Thus, the paper will highlight the analytical potentials of compounds in discourse analysis based on how Swedish allows for and visualises the creation of compounds by combining existing words to form new morphologically coherent lexical units. We will argue that this particular form of lexical composition holds relevance as a unit of analysis in computational linguistic studies as well as a discursive phenomenon, offering concentrated semantic information compared to simplex nouns that often necessitate the embedding in multi-word expressions to convey similar meaning.

Through a close examination of how our words of interest (‘terrorism’ and ‘market’) co-occur with other words in compounds, we are able to describe semantic patterns of word usage that includes evaluative approaches and attitudes. Key analytical tools in our context include word frequency analysis, examination of keyword collocations, and exploration of multi-word expressions, such as phrases, involving the focal keywords. The latter often reveal entrenched phraseological relations for a word, providing insights into its lexical, syntactic, and semantic characteristics (Koteyko et al. 2010). We argue that this is crucial for understanding the discursive use of concepts – how words are situated within specific contexts or text genres – and contributes to the creation of a recurring perception of the phenomena they represent.

Material

Both projects utilise publicly available Swedish parliamentary datasets. The Market language project case for this paper draws from the complete data set of texts from the Bicameral Parliament of 1867 to 1970. This data set has been available through the Swedish parliament website in .pdf and .xml formats since some years but have been downloaded by the project’s LT analysts and also been processed, annotated and included in the Språkbanken Text infrastructure as a subcorpus, “Tvåkammarriksdagen”, with the possibility to employ sub-genre categories for specialised searches. The period of the Swedish Bicameral parliament from 1867 to 1970 is of particular interest for the project since it is functioning in a time dominated by industrialization and economic changes where the foundations for a modern market economy and also the modern Swedish democracy are laid out.

The work in the SweTerror project departs from the dataset of the corpus of the minutes provided by Westac and SWERIK that are currently being cleaned up, partly re-digitised and curated for research purposes (latest version 0.14). Notably, the dataset is annotated with metadata about Members of Parliament (MPs) concerning name, party affiliation, gender and regional representation. There is also an ongoing exchange between SweTerror and Westac, with SweTerror’s LT analyst Olsson (on advisory board for SWERIK) further enriching and curating the data for our research purposes and contributing with various forms of quality control. The reason for the extensive - compared to the Market case study - study period beyond 1970 is that terrorism went through drastic changes during the 1970s and early 2000s.

Case Study 1: Market

The results from the Market Language Project so far are primarily based on the productivity of compounds, both in terms of their occurrence and frequency in the current material, as well as the emergence of new compound forms that begin to be used over time in the text material of the Bicameral Parliament. We have previously discussed this productivity aspect of compositional forms in Ohlsson et al. (2022). The earlier results indicate that new compositional forms exerting significant influence in terms of usage represent areas that gain prominence in political debates and also have the capacity to generate further compositional forms.

A trend that we further explore in this paper, is the consistent increase in new compositional forms featuring "market" as an element, spanning the period from 1867 to 1970 in the parliamentary texts at hand, with an accelerating rate particularly evident from around 1920 onwards, and later also an increase in the post WW2 period aligned with the so called Swedish model of combining a free market economy with redistributive politics. For instance, the emergence of the compound arbetsmarknad (labour market) leads to the creation of additional compositions, based on that compound. These patterns of compositional productivity serve as a foundation for discussing the growing utilisation of the concept of market in political discourse in general and the attribution of new properties and roles to the concept itself.

Case Study 2: Terrorism

The second case study will focus on the development of the closely related words ‘terror’ and ‘terrorism’ when they appear as constituents in compounds, as manifested in the Swedish parliamentary discourse, 1867–2018. We have previously shown that although the word terrorism has been used since 1867, terror-related words and compounds first gained traction from 1918 and onwards with the word terrorism gaining its modern meaning in the early 1970s. More specifically, we found a distinct legislative framing of the issue of terrorism in the Swedish Parliament with 9/11 in 2001 serving as a watershed moment for the rise in the production of compound neologisms and a stronger counterterrorism discourse (Fridlund et al. 2022; Brodén et al. 2023). We also observed an increase in the production of compound neologisms with ‘terrorism’ from 2015 and onwards, likely resulting from the emergence of the Islamic State and a range of terrorist attacks in Europe (Ängsal et al. i.p).

Besides chronologically tracing compound neologisms, we will apply word vectors to more deeply examine discursive transformations, examining other terms that carry similar meaning as neologisms. Furthermore, taking into account meta-data about party affiliation of MPs who use neologisms, will be able to focus on the extent to which different political parties have used different compounds, allowing for a more multidimensional perspective on the role of neologisms in the development of the Swedish parliamentary discourse on terrorism.

Conclusions

We conclude by drawing together the two projects specific lines of inquiry, highlighting compound neologisms as a specific morphological feature of primary Germanic languages and, thus, presenting a potential key to opening up methodological perspectives on text mining the formation and development of political discourses. In our engagement with the data we have been able to discuss and showcase the potentials of divulging compound neologisms as a front door to discursive change over time. One such example is how the market concept has ‘colonised’ different political domains by the use of new types of compounds, such as bostadsmarknad (market for housing). Another example is the rise of novel terrorism compound types such as terrorresa/terroristresa/terrorismresa (terrorism travel) after the emergence of the Islamic State, indicating how the parliamentary engagement with political violence has changed discursively. Our contribution will thus feed into ongoing discussions about text mining approaches for tracing discursive transformations in large-scale text collections.