Lexical analysis of pre and post revolution discourse in Portugal

Abstract

This paper presents a lexical comparison of pre (1954-74) and post (1974-94) revolution parliamentary discourse in four comparable sub-corpora extracted from the Reference Corpus of Contemporary Portuguese (CRPC). After introducing the CRPC, including annotation and meta-data, we focus on a subset of the corpus dealing with parliamentary discourses, more particularly a time frame of forty years divided into four comparable sub-corpora, each covering a ten-year period, two pre revolution and two post revolution. We extract lexical density information as well as salient terms pertaining to each period to make a comparative evaluation of the periods. Our results show how a linguistic analysis essentially based on the use of simple n-gram statistics can produce key insights into the use, change and evolution of the Portuguese language around a critical time period in its history.