A Comparison of Collocations in the Totalitarian Language of the Former Czechoslovakia and Those in Contemporary Czech

Abstract

The goal of this small sample study is to explore what possible effects a political situation and ideologization of public discourse ma have on language and its lexis. Using two corpora, one composed of the 1952, 1969 and 1977 text characterizing the totalitarian languge of the former Czechoslovakia and the other based on contemporary texts, the study compares the seven most frequent collocates of seven lemmas.

Keywords

• totalitarian language
• contemporary language
• collocations
• corpus-based comparison
• ideologization
• connotaton
• prosody