Denotation Shifts in New Coinages in Media Discourses on Politics

Abstract

The Chapter traces instances of how the intensional content of words in political discourse can be manipulated. The analysis is conducted on a dataset specifically constructed for the purposes of this study; the dataset consists of commentaries from a Bulgarian radio talk show. A list of keywords from the talk show is extracted and the intensional content of the words in the list is investigated. Petofi’s representation of the lexicon item in discourse is employed to compare the referents and the meanings associated with the various occurrences of specific items in the dataset. The focus falls on (a) items’ meanings interpreted as representing intensional content, and (b) the way they are transferred from dictionary definitions and injected with components from other lexicon items. The claim is that this type of figuration represents what is known as political spin.