ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 lays the necessary methodological groundwork by providing a condensed description of the key keyword extraction method deployed as a bottom-up entry point into the 1952–2008 Presidential Campaign Speeches corpus. Chapter 1 summarizes the rationale behind such a methodological choice and explains how the key keyword extraction procedure triggered further analyses—to wit, concordance reading, collocation analyses and Bible-specific N-gram identification—as well as explorations into several other specialized corpora. Chapter 1 also reviews some of the limitations pertaining to the corpus linguistic approach taken in this research.
