Open Access

Ekkehard Felder, Janine Luth, Friedemann Vogel

• On the basis of a law text corpus which consists of judicial decisions and jurisprudential papers on so-called assisted suicide from 1977 to 2011, agonal centres are determined within the paradigm of corpus-based pragma-semiotic text analysis. Agonal centres are defined as action-guiding concepts that are in conflict with each other concerning the general acceptance of event interpretations, options for actions, claims of validity, contextual knowledge and values. These action-guiding concepts are derived with the help of quantitative and qualitative methods. Discourse linguistic interpretations are thus rendered more objective with the help of semi-automatic methods; furthermore, specific discourse features of the discourse and approaches to interpretation can be derived from (un)expected linguistic significances of occurrence, distribution, frequency etc. at the linguistic surface. Finally, these agonal centres specific to the language of law are compared to agonal centres which are determined on the basis of a media corpus on the same issue. This provides a comparative insight into the constitution of a seemingly identical fact in everyday and special language, which demonstrates the sociopolitical relevance of analysing the constitution of reality as instructed by language.