Abstract

Recent financial crisis raises the interest of the humanity in politics and those who govern the situations, politicians. The latter are very much now criticized for what they say, what they do and the degree of consistency among their words and actions. Political language and political linguistics have gained the interest of researchers. In this work we are dealing with the acquisition, organizing and processing of political language material for the building of a dynamic database and an LSP (languages for specific purposes) corpus of political speech. We collected language material from the Greek Parliament, extending, refining and updating the initial-stage database (Frantzi, 2007). At the same time we extended and updated the corpus of political speech that was in parallel created. The corpus consists of more than 10,000,000 words at the moment. The database is dynamic and keeps meta-data for every text added to the corpus. The corpus, also dynamic, is organized in such a way that it can be used for various studies and comparisons. It can be used as a whole, but various sub-corpora can be also considered regarding the texts’ authors identities: sex, political party, affiliation, and more. As part of the future work, the corpus and the database will be applied for the answering of various research questions on the words of politics in the research fields of linguistics, politics and communication.