DOI 10.55206/JMWZ9719
Elena Tarasheva
New Bulgarian University
E-mail: etarasheva@nbu.bg
Abstract: The paper presents findings from a corpus study of the discourse of the parliamentary speeches of the former co-chairman of the political party Produljavame Promyanata (We Continue the Change) Kiril Petkov. The corpus is representative of the politician and his speeches in the National Assembly of Bulgaria, as it includes the entire speech production recorded in the Hansard of the National Assembly from December 2021 to July 2025 – a total of 156 speeches, 42,864 words. A newly launched method for calculating keywords, Text Dispersion, is employed: calculations of the logarithmic probability, which compares the frequency in the study corpus to that in a balanced corpus, are preceded by a count of the segments in the corpus that contain the keyword. High-frequency repetitions, collocations, cognitive metaphors, and rhetorical means of argumentation are tracked. Conclusions are drawn about salient concepts, topoi, and linguistic features of the parliamentarian’s speech.
Keywords: political rhetoric, critical discourse analysis, corpus assisted discourse studies.
Rhetoric and Communications Journal, issue 65, October 2025