Identification of ideologically loaded linguistic items in the debates of Lithuanian Seimas on the topic of the migrant crisis

Abstract

The paper discusses ideologically loaded language, ways in which ideologically loaded elements can be detected in texts and how these methods of detection can be automated and applied to computer programs. Language and ideology are fundamentally inseparable concepts that are intertwined in various ways. This makes the study of ideology in the field of language both popular amongst academics of different disciplines and difficult. Two corpora were constructed for the analyses, using transcripts of the debates of Lithuanian Seimas on the topic of the 2021 migrant crisis in Lithuania. This is a relevant topic today not only from the point of view of political and social sciences, but also from the point of view of linguistics, specifically, the identification of the current expression of the ideologized language. The study focuses on a definition of ideology as an object of linguistics and the use of lexical units of modality and evidentiality to form a prototype for the detection of ideologised language elements in texts and corpora.