‘Achilles’ Heel’ and Democratic Society
A Corpora Analysis of Journalistic Texts
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.12797/Politeja.23.2026.102.09Keywords:
Achilles’ heel, society, Slovakia, democracy, corporaAbstract
The study examines the well-known and metaphorically often used, popular idiomatic expression ‘Achilles’ heel’ in the Slovak corpus of journalistic texts, in the context of social and democratic processes. The research is based on the ethnolinguistic explanation of the phraseological units containing the word ‘heel’. The study uses the tools of corpus linguistics to verify the frequency, collocation fields and contextual use of given phraseological phrases. It focuses on identifying key areas of Slovak society that are named in journalism by the unflattering attribute of the Achilles’ heel, i.e. a weak, vulnerable point, etc. The research is carried out in two corpora: 1. in the corpus of written texts prim-10.0-public-inf (SNK public inf version 10.0, Size: 1,163,232,349) and 2. in the time-limited corpus of the SME daily in the period since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine 01/2022 – 06/2023.3 The comparison of the two corpora points to different weak and vulnerable points (the so-called Achilles’ heels) of Slovak society (and democracy) as they appear in journalistic texts.
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