Polarisation: the new 'superword'. Meanings and current uses in English and Spanish

A growing concern in most European countries, polarisation has spread far beyond the political arena and is now present in public opinion in a wide variety of social and cultural subjects, from economics to education, health, environment or religion. Rather than an enriching plurality of views, polarisation is mostly perceived as a negative trend that hinders consensus and favours conflict instead, threatening welfare, peace and even democracy. As a result, the word polarisation has become a frequent term in the press. This paper examines the way in which the word polarisation is used in a corpus of news items collected from four widely read mainstream newspapers, two Spanish and two British, all of them containing the word polarización/polarisation and published in 2022. A combination of Corpus Linguistics methods and a Critical Socio-Cognitive approach to Discourse Analysis has been followed in order to analyse the most common contexts and patterns of usage of the term in the press in these two countries, its negative semantic prosody and collocational behaviour, as well as the underlying schematic conceptualization of the phenomenon as realized in metaphors and image schemas. Even though minor differences have been found, results show significant similarities in Spanish and English, which manifest the negative evaluation associated to the term construed by its collocates, by metaphorical source domains such as disease, war or dangerous natural forces, as well as by image schemas that impinge on physical and ideological distance. Conclusions suggest that polarisation has become a sociopolitical keyword, a ‘superword’ with enhanced meanings and strong framing effects in the texts in which it occurs.