Die Vermessung des Populären?

The explorative project analyses the quantifiable linguistic traces of the popular in large text corpora, such as press articles, forum posts and company websites. The starting point of the study is the assumption that recurrent patterns of language use – such as catchwords or fixed word combinations – both constitute social practices and reflect discourse mentalities. The article analyses the extent to which high-frequency linguistic patterns indicate the effectiveness of the popular in discourses and how changes in language use can be interpreted as an indicator of a change in mentalities.