‘in a world of complex threats...’: Discourses of in/security in the State of the Union Address (1790-2014). A diachronic corpus-assisted study

The paper provides an interdisciplinary, corpus-assisted critical discourse investigation of ‘in/security’ in a specialized diachronic corpus consisting of a complete set of 228 State of the Union Addresses covering a whole span of time from President Washington’s first address in 1790 to President Obama in 2014. As such it aims at a long-gaze perspective on the construal of ‘in/security’ in one of the most crucial sites of presidential power. Moving from the assumptions that ‘security’ and ‘insecurity’ are mutually co-existent, the analysis of the lemma threat provides a case-study in order to show what type(s) of ‘in/security’ have been represented by U.S. administrations in order to legitimise and justify security practices throughout their history.