The thesis quantitatively measures the extent to which a selection of speeches of two Dutch and two UK politicians, Thierry Baudet, Geert Wilders, Nigel Farage, and Boris Johnson, contain lexical...Show moreThe thesis quantitatively measures the extent to which a selection of speeches of two Dutch and two UK politicians, Thierry Baudet, Geert Wilders, Nigel Farage, and Boris Johnson, contain lexical and grammatical indicators of a populist communication style.Show less
In his 2011 book Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language, David Crystal investigated the use of biblical idioms in English popular culture. Additionally, he compiled a list of eighteen...Show moreIn his 2011 book Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language, David Crystal investigated the use of biblical idioms in English popular culture. Additionally, he compiled a list of eighteen idioms that were first coined in the King James Bible. Following Crystal’s research topic, this paper investigated these eighteen idioms for frequency and variation in the TIME Magazine Corpus (1923-2006), which consists of 100 million words. The purpose of this paper was to establish the significance of these eighteen idioms in present-day American English. Idioms were searched in the corpus both in their original phrasing and variant forms. The most important conclusion that can be drawn from the results is that the extent to which a biblical idiom lends itself for variation is an important factor in its level of relevance in non-biblical contexts.Show less
