Since the 1980s, a growing body of scholarship suggests that societal concerns and management of risk have become a central feature of modernising societies. Most prominently Ulrich Beck has asserted that modern societies were increasingly confronted with the side-effects of social progress challenging the modern machinery, such as science and insurance, to manage risk. Since this early focus on technological advancement and environmental degeneration, there have been little systematic empirical analyses of the forces that drove the proliferation of risk in the public sphere. Following suggestions by Luhmann, among others, that the risk semantic is central to modernisation and Skolbekken’s description that since 1945 medical journals have experienced a ‘risk epidemic’, this article examines the developments and events responsible for the social proliferation of health risk. In particular, I utilise The Times corpus (1790–2009) provided by the Corpus Approaches to Social Sciences research centre at Lancaster University, and the corpus linguistics tool CQPweb, for a detailed quantitative and qualitative analysis of language in its social contexts. I argue that the occurrence and increasingly widespread use of the ‘at risk’-expression indicate a transformation of public consciousness related to a growing social prominence of health and well-being, the normalisation of rational management of health, and the definition of social reality by its ‘at risk’-status.

自1980年代以来，越来越多的学者表示社会关注和风险管理已成为社会现代化的主要特征。最为著名的乌尔里希·贝克（Ulrich Beck）断言，现代社会越来越多地面临着社会进步的副作用，挑战了科学和保险等现代机制来管理风险。自从早期专注于技术进步和环境退化以来，几乎没有对推动公共领域风险扩散的因素进行系统的实证分析。遵循卢曼（Luhmann）等人的建议，风险语义对现代化至关重要，斯科尔贝克肯（Skolbekken）描述自1945年以来医学期刊经历了“风险流行”，本文探讨了导致健康风险社会扩散的发展和事件。我特别利用兰开斯特大学的“语料库社会科学方法”研究中心和语料库语言学工具CQPweb提供了“时报语料库”（1790-2009），用于在其社会环境中对语言进行详细的定量和定性分析。我认为，“处于危险中”的表达方式的出现和越来越广泛的使用表明，公众意识的转变与健康和福祉在社会上的地位日益提高，健康合理管理的规范化以及社会现实的定义有关。通过其“处于危险中”状态。