Searching in German or Italian dictionaries or encyclopaedias, one immediately notices that the concept of “Europe” is difficult to define: due to its polysemy, the lemma Europe is often used in order to condense complex meanings and communicate specific messages. Rather than looking for a precise definition of the term, it could prove much more interesting to try and understand its use: how often does it appear within a specific field/context? What are the most frequent metaphors and frames appearing with this term? Are there any differences in the thematization of this term in different countries? This contribution aims at answering these questions with reference to websites of German and Italian speaking countries. In order to reach this aim, the corpora of two “families” available on Sketch Engine were used: “Timestamped JSI” and “TenTen”. From a methodological point of view, this study followed a quantitative and qualitative discourse analytic approach: firstly, the frequency of use of the lemma Europe and its n-grams was analysed, together with collocations and concordances, the latter being vital in order to give a proper qualitative evaluation of the data on the frequency of each collocate; through the study of collocates, specific frames and metaphors emerged. All these data were presented in a contrastive way, underlining analogies and differences between the Italian and German corpora. The last part is dedicated to possible developments and research perspectives on this topic. The present paper aims at contributing to a topical debate on how Europe is represented and therefore “communicated” through a powerful means such as the web.
'Europa' sul web: Un’analisi contrastiva italiano-tedesco
Eugenio Verra
2025-01-01
Abstract
Searching in German or Italian dictionaries or encyclopaedias, one immediately notices that the concept of “Europe” is difficult to define: due to its polysemy, the lemma Europe is often used in order to condense complex meanings and communicate specific messages. Rather than looking for a precise definition of the term, it could prove much more interesting to try and understand its use: how often does it appear within a specific field/context? What are the most frequent metaphors and frames appearing with this term? Are there any differences in the thematization of this term in different countries? This contribution aims at answering these questions with reference to websites of German and Italian speaking countries. In order to reach this aim, the corpora of two “families” available on Sketch Engine were used: “Timestamped JSI” and “TenTen”. From a methodological point of view, this study followed a quantitative and qualitative discourse analytic approach: firstly, the frequency of use of the lemma Europe and its n-grams was analysed, together with collocations and concordances, the latter being vital in order to give a proper qualitative evaluation of the data on the frequency of each collocate; through the study of collocates, specific frames and metaphors emerged. All these data were presented in a contrastive way, underlining analogies and differences between the Italian and German corpora. The last part is dedicated to possible developments and research perspectives on this topic. The present paper aims at contributing to a topical debate on how Europe is represented and therefore “communicated” through a powerful means such as the web.
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