Historical discourse semantics aims at investigating the use of linguistic means (words, concepts, sentences, texts) in discourses in order to explore the social awareness of reality (Busse 1987, 2005, 2020; Busse/Hermanns/Teubert 1994; Lehmann/Richter 1996; Fritz [1998] 2006)
It explores diachronic developments through word and discourse fields, and embeds them into a cross-textual and contextualized discourse. In contrast to the lexeme-bound conceptual history established by Reinhard Koselleck (1979, 2004, 2006), historical discourse semantics allows for a qualitative and quantitative treatment of paradigmatic and syntagmatic word fields, connotative features, antonyms as well as historical concretisations of the use of temporal concepts.
At the same time, similar to the history of emotions, it interrogates the genesis and extra-textual conditions of discourses,as well as the non-discursive practices of power and exclusionary mechanisms such as prohibitions, rituals and doctrine in which they are embedded (Foucault 1971). This approach, which has also been applied to the history of emotions (Grubmüller 2003; Haubrichs 2003 Ziolkowksi 2003), allows to elaborate competing viewpoints within the discursive field, to disentangle a discourse of time-related emotions, as represented in medieval Japanese literature, and to reconstruct the intellectual and ideological background of past times by way of language and texts.
