Abstract: The main purpose of this case study is to describe how corruption scandals; its actors and actions are linguistically conceptualized by the Serbian public word usage. The Agrokomerc scandal that was investigated from 1987 to 1989 in former Yugoslavia will serve as an example to show what kind of vocabulary as well as discourse-specific metaphors were used to describe the corruption scandal in the Serbian mass media. For this purpose, a text corpus was created that contains 137 articles from the Serbian newspaper Politika. The selected articles address the corruption scandal “Agrokomerc”. Data-driven, corpus linguistic methods will be used for this case study. This method enables the identification of concrete lexical units that can be further interpreted and used in a wider and interdisciplinary context. 

Keywords: corruption, scandal, Agrokomerc, mass media, semantics, corpus linguistics

Summary 

This study focuses on the public word usage describing the Agrokomerc scandal in the Serbian newspaper Politika. Corpus linguistic methods were used to identify the vocabulary used to describe the Agrokomerc scandal as well as the scandalized actors and actions that were labelled as corrupt. This linguistic analysis provides a base for further qualitative analyses in other disciplines dealing with corruption. Th e media especially focused on the key actors involved in the scandal, namely Fikret Abdić the director of the company “Agrokomerc“ and on various banks and its employees working with the  company. The scandalised action primarily revolves around promissory notes without coverage that were issued by “Agrokomerc”. Various descriptions of the promissory notes could be identified in the corpus. Especially negatively evaluated vocabulary could be attributed to the actors working with Abdić as well as to the actions that were performed using the promissory notes, including labels, such as prljava rabota, ujdurma and korupcija.  While the collected data can only be interpreted to some extent within the discipline of linguistics, other disciplines can off er further insights. The linguistic analysis provided data about the Communist Party, the legislation, various companies, and locations mentioned in the newspaper articles from Politika that can for instance be used for historical contextualization as well as for legal or economic studies.