Focus on cultural keywords

It is common today to find the notion of keyword used in various research domains and for different purposes, from computer science to cultural studies, linguistic anthropology and argumentation. This use is so widespread that the notion itself is often taken for granted, also because it is easily understood at an intuitive level. Nonetheless it seems important to try to define the notion of keyword and give some criteria for the discovery of keywords in texts. In this article keywords will be looked at from a cultural point of view, reconstructing three main research perspectives on the subject. In these studies keywords are used as tools that can give insights into cultures, societies or historical periods. A review of these studies will enable us to retrace a general definition of cultural keywords, to find some indications as to how they can be recovered and analysed in texts, and to outline some further lines of research.