Deutsche Plenardebatten zur Analyse kollektiven Gedächtnisses. Eine sprachwissenschaftliche Fallstudie innerhalb des Vertreibungsdiskurses

German plenary debates for the analysis of collective memory: A linguistic case study within the discourse of “Vertreibung”. Collective memory can be seen as a construct and parliament is one of the places where this construct is linguistically negotiated in front of society. Based on these assumptions this paper investigates the construction of German collective memory in German parliamentary debates conducting a case study on the discourse of “Vertreibung”, which is particularly important for recent German history. Methodologically, it will be suggested that a politolinguistic discourse analysis can be fruitful in this context. The case study will focus on the lexeme Vertreibung and its word forms and compounds and it will be divided into two parts: firstly, the quantitative-qualitative analysis will encompass German plenary protocols from 1949 until 2021 and it will be carried out within a corpus of parliamentary protocols through the functions available on the platform Discourse Lab; secondly, a thorough qualitative investigation of lexis, metaphors and frames and prototypical arguments will be conducted evaluating one legislative period (1980-1983) through the software MAXQDA. This paper demonstrates that parliamentary communication can be particularly relevant to the study of the construction of collective memory and how this can be achieved by using a politolinguistic discourse analytical approach.