This article introduces the special issue ‘risk as discourse' which is based on contributions at a session at the CADAAD 2008 conference in Hertfordshire, UK. The aim of the session and this special issue is to trigger cross-disciplinary work which connects risk sociology and corpus linguistics research strategies to advance our understanding of societal risk phenomena.

Even though in academic and public debate ‘risk' has become a core concept in particular after WWII, there is still limited empirically proven knowledge about the historical development of increasing ‘risk communication'. I argue that more cross disciplinary work which links sociological research interests with corpus linguistics research tools could significantly improve our understanding of how and why the risk semantic entered the social realm so successfully.

In the following, I show that linguistic analysis of the usage of 'risk' could enrich sociological analysis of risk phenomena which often focuses only on specific aspects of the risk semantic. There is evidence revealed by linguistic work that sociological analyses tend to use artificially constructed examples instead of real life examples, which then weakens the analysis. Furthermore, I will suggest perspectives for further research by preliminary analysis of the historical change of the usage of ‘risk' and related semantics in the news-coverage of the New York Times. The increasingly available digitised text data such, as newspaper archives, are a valuable source for all kinds of (historical) analysis (not only) on ‘risk' and related semantics, to improve our understanding of cross-cultural differences and social changes in particular.