Diskurmorphologische Perspektiven auf die Risikowahrnehmung von Atom- bzw. Kernenergie : Eine explorative Studie

Since the twentieth century, the debate on nuclear energy has gained worldwide prominence and continues to be of considerable social and political relevance. Recurrent historical events have repeatedly reignited this debate, reinforcing the perception of nuclear energy as a potentially high-risk technology. Against this background, the present study adopts a discourse-morphological approach to examine how risk perception related to nuclear energy is linguistically constructed in discourse. The analysis is based on a virtual corpus drawn from the German Reference Corpus (DeReKo) covering the period from 2011 to 2022, spanning the Fukushima nuclear accident and the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war, two events that have significantly contributed to an increased perception of nuclear-related risk. The study focuses on German compounds formed with the initial elements Atom-, Kern- and Nuklear-, which are analysed on both a morpho-structural and a semantic-discursive level. Particular attention is paid to compounds that articulate notions of risk, uncertainty and potential danger associated with nuclear energy. The findings indicate that the three initial elements differ notably in their semantic distribution and discursive functions, thereby fulfilling distinct roles in the linguistic negotiation of risk.