Studying keywords in discourse: contrasting different theories and methods

This article aims at contributing to the recent development of corpus-based research which tries to account for the different features that make specific words play a ‘key’ role in discourse. It proposes to approach this ‘keyness’ in terms of sociopolitical (vs statistical) significance and hence discusses the defining properties of what Jeffries & Walker (2018, p. 4) call ‘sociopolitical keywords’ from a more qualitative perspective. Since there are different labels and different understandings of these qualitatively defined keywords, we review different works on sociopolitical keywords (or related notions) and we discuss them with the aim of offering a general theoretical framework for this concept. In order to introduce the special issue of the Journal of Corpora and Discourse Studies about keywords in sociopolitical debates which includes works on different languages using quantitative and qualitative methods, we also discuss the context-specificness of sociopolitical keywords and highlight the diverse methodologies that have been used to approach this particular discursive phenomenon.