Representations of citizens/hip in 230 years of American history. A diachronic corpus-assisted approach

The paper examines how American presidents have discursively constructed citizens/hip over 230 years of American political history from an interdisciplinary perspective, using a domain-specific, complete corpus of around 1,830,000 words of digitized State of the Union Addresses. The aim of the paper is two-fold. First, it will explore whether, when and how the discourses surrounding citizens/hip have evolved over time. Second, by examining the longitudinal distribution and the variation of the semantic profile of citizens/hip, this study will provide a critical examination of the ‘cycle’ thesis in political history (Skowronek 2011) from a diachronic corpus-assisted discourse analytical perspective (Partington 2010).