Despite increasing life expectancy and high levels of welfare, health care, and public safety in most post-industrial countries, the public discourse often revolves around perceived threats. Terrorism, global pandemics, and environmental catastrophes are just a few of the risks that dominate media coverage. Is this public discourse on risk disconnected from reality? To examine this issue, we analyzed the dynamics of the risk discourse in two natural language text corpora. Specifically, we tracked latent semantic patterns over a period of 150 years to address four questions: First, we examined how the frequency of the word risk has changed over historical time. Is the construct of risk playing an ever-increasing role in the public discourse, as the sociological notion of a ‘risk society’ suggests? Second, we investigated how the sentiments for the words co-occurring with risk have changed. Are the connotations of risk becoming increasingly ominous? Third, how has the meaning of risk changed relative to close associates such as danger and hazard? Is risk more subject to semantic change? Finally, we decompose the construct of risk into the specific topics with which it has been associated and track those topics over historical time. This brief history of the semantics of risk reveals new and surprising insights—a fourfold increase in frequency, increasingly negative sentiment, a semantic drift toward forecasting and prevention, and a shift away from war toward chronic disease—reflecting the conceptual evolution of risk in the archeological records of public discourse.

尽管大多数后工业化国家的预期寿命不断延长，福利、医疗保健和公共安全水平也很高，但公众的讨论往往围绕着感知到的威胁。恐怖主义、全球流行病和环境灾难只是主导媒体报道的几个风险。这种关于风险的公开讨论是否脱离了现实？为了研究这个问题，我们分析了两个自然语言文本语料库中风险话语的动态。具体来说，我们跟踪了 150 年期间的潜在语义模式，以解决四个问题：首先，我们研究了单词风险的频率随历史时间的变化。正如“风险社会”的社会学概念所暗示的那样，风险的概念在公共话语中扮演着越来越重要的角色吗？其次，我们调查了与风险同时出现的词的情绪如何变化。风险的含义是否变得越来越不祥？第三，相对于危险和危险等密切相关的风险，风险的含义发生了怎样的变化？风险是否更容易受到语义变化的影响？最后，我们将风险的构造分解为与其相关的特定主题，并在历史时间内跟踪这些主题。风险语义的简史揭示了新的、令人惊讶的见解——频率增加四倍、负面情绪日益增加、语义转向预测和预防，以及从战争转向慢性疾病——反映了风险概念的演变。公共话语的考古记录。