Idiomatische Phraseme am Beispiel von Wahlkampf-Posts deutscher politischer Parteien

Abstract

Political discourse in its various forms and expressions is characterised by the use of phrasemes, including slogans, proverbs, quotations, etc. It also features the so-called «emologismi» (cf. Antonelli 2017: 6), that is to say words, phrases and formulae that function as «emoticons» aiming to impress voters by focusing attention on the emotional aspects of the discourse. Moreover, in the multimedia age, posts published on social media become an efficient and powerful medium used by political parties to present and support their ideas in an attempt to appeal to voters and hold their attention. The corpus-based analysis focuses on idiomatic phrasemes, their semantic and pragmatic characteristics as well as on some functions they perform in such election campaign posts. Because of the immediacy and intelligibility of these phrases, they can give emphasis to the text or provide a concise explanation of a passage. In addition, they can also help to negatively connote a political opponent, contribute to the self-presentation of politicians, or – not least – to favour their contact with the voters. In particular the modification of idioms plays furthermore an important role (Elspaß 2007: 288) thanks to their metaphorical features as well as their expressive potential. The analysis is carried out on a corpus consisting of the posts of some German political parties on the occasion of the federal elections on 24th September 2017.