Perspectives on keywords and keyness: an introduction

Starting from the different interpretations of the expression "key words" - as searching tools, in text mining and classification, but also as analytic tools in text interpretation and discourse analysis - this chapter focuses on the relationship between words and text, looking at the co-text of the word, but also at the cultural context that informs the text, where culture is taken to mean the repertoires of meanings shared within a community (e.g. national, or local, but also disciplinary). Keywords are often taken to be markers of the “aboutness” and the style of a text; in this chapter we lookat what structures of textuality keywords point to and how far they are also informed by the position of the writer, in the context of text production. The words and expressions that recurrently identify the conceptual structures and the organizational structures of a text or corpus can be studied to illuminate features of the discourse that produces the text or corpus. The keywords that point to the aboutness of a text or corpus will be key to the ontology of the discourse. The keywords that point to textual organization will be key to the epistemology. We explore these preliminary statements through a case study of a landmark text: the General Theory by John Maynard Keynes.