Representations of Citizens/hip in 230 Years of American History. A Diachronic Corpus-assisted Approach

Abstract

The paper examines how American presidents have discursively constructed citizens (and citizenship) over more than two hundred years of American political history from an interdisciplinary perspective. As one deeply contested concept in different political arenas (Wiesner et al 2017), involving aspects of collective identities, citizens/hip has been at the very heart of Western democracies since ancient times, although its significance has gradually increased in modern periods (Marshall 1950, Bayley et al. 2013).

Keywords

• citizenship
• us presidents
• american political history
• corpus linguistics
• political discourse