The financial crisis hits hard: Linguistic change and discursive patterns in EU financial stability reviews (2004-2010)

The present paper analyzes how financial discourse may be affected by emerging crisis phenomena. Our main research question is: how is the 2007-2010 world financial crisis reflected in or deviated by language? We present an examination of the EU Financial Stability Reviews (FSRs) drawn up between December 2004 and June 2010, for a total of over one million words. We have conducted both a quantitative (using Wordsmith Tools 5.0) and a qualitative analysis, both textual/linguistic and discursive. Methodologically, we have considered the overview of each FSR as a prototype and executive summary. Hence, we extracted a key word list from this sub-corpus which gave us the preliminary results on the evolution of crisis lexis in the time span considered, and enabled us to divide our entire corpus into three main historical periods. The study then describes some qualitative outcomes, with special emphasis for the main rhetorical and pragmatic features found.