Abstract
There is relatively little doubt that climate change has become one of the most contentious issues of our times, and it is widely acknowledged that the media is one of the resources from which the public’s perceptions of such controversial issues are derived. Representations of Climate Change investigates how climate change is portrayed in UK and US news and opinion discourse. It is thus a timely contribution which not only helps its readers to understand how information about climate change is disseminated, but also sets a practical example of how to conduct a corpus-assisted discourse analysis.
Chapter 1 provides detailed background information on climate change, including the most relevant events that have taken place and the most significant reports on it. This information justifies why the year 2007 is of particular importance for the news representations of climate change and in turn explains why the corpus compiled for this study consists only of news articles from that year.
Chapter 2 is concerned with the theoretical and methodological background of the research. First, it reviews some influential ways in which discourse has been conceptualized, and compares different discourse analytical traditions. Second, it provides detailed introductions to the analysis of discourse within the systemic-functional linguistic paradigm and one of the theories developed within that paradigm: Peter White’s appraisal theory. Third, it offers an introduction to approaches to newspaper discourse, touching on the critical approach, critical discourse analysis and White’s analysis of the rhetoric of the news. Finally, it maps the connections between corpus linguistics and discourse analysis and points out the importance of combining the two, because both quantitative and qualitative analyses are pivotal in doing discourse analysis.
Chapter 3 provides detailed information about the Climate Change Press Corpus. We learn that the corpus includes items from several UK and US quality press publications in the first three months and the last month of 2007. Therefore, for the sake of comparative analyses, the whole corpus is divided into two subcorpora: UK and US. Moreover, the chapter discusses how news, features, editorials, letters and opinion and comment articles can be categorized and how they are distributed over the corpus. Finally, the author presents some preliminary findings by comparing word lists and key word lists across genres in the UK and US subcorpora.
In Chapter 4, the author presents her findings concerning patterns of lexis on climate change in hard news discourse. By examining the collocational profiles of climate change/global warming, four patterns sharing similar semantic functions are identified as the science of climate change, taking action, engaging responsibility and the threat of climate change. Concordance analyses of words in each semantic domain, such as caus*, fight*, commit* to, threat*, etc., have been conducted. Through efficient analyses realized by constant ‘shunting’ (Miller, 2006: 248) between instances of 176 concordance lines and instances of wider texts, interesting findings are summarized.
If we say the hard news analysis presented in Chapter 4 adopts a rather lexically oriented perspective, Chapter 5 shows how climate change in opinion discourse is construed by looking at how the evaluative stance is constructed in both UK and US editorial and op-ed (opinion and comment) articles. This chapter first elaborates the concepts of evaluative stance and intersubjective positioning in opinion discourse, and then examines in detail the semantics of necessity by conducting a corpus analysis of the modal word should in both UK and US editorial articles. In op-ed articles, pronouns such as we, our, I and you are examined to show how intersubjective positioning is managed through the use of personal deixis.
The concluding Chapter 6 sums up the main findings and points out some limitations of the work, for instance that other genres have been excluded and that the diachronic dimension has not been considered even though it might be useful to include it in future research.
Over recent years we can observe an increasing use of corpus linguistic methodology, and quite a lot of work combining corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis has been done. Representations of Climate Change can thus be considered another successful and practical example for this growing field. However, by calling this research corpus-assisted discourse analysis, the author moves perhaps too rashly away from the strict scientific methodology of corpus linguistics and the dependable results it delivers, by stating that ‘frequency . . . from the perspective of corpus-assisted discourse analysis . . . cannot be regarded as a leading principle’ (p. 51). However, frequency analysis is what the corpus-driven approach (something not attempted in this book) relies heavily on: it shows features common for and relevant to a large number of occurrences. Of course, to conduct this study in the framework of systemic functional linguistics gives more weight to the lexically oriented approach, while the search for larger discourse patterns, those patterns that frame people’s beliefs and attitudes, has to go beyond the usual collocational analysis and must take into account paraphrastic content (Teubert, 2010) in the wider context of the key words in question. This is particularly relevant for studies comparing different cultures or exploring the diachronic dimension.
However, as this book gives readers a comparatively detailed introduction to fundamental concepts in corpus linguistics, discourse analysis and systemic functional linguistics, and as it offers an uncommonly thorough investigation of such a salient discourse object as climate change, it can be considered a practical handbook for students who conduct related studies. Readers interested in this kind of discourse studies will also find it informative in showing how corpus linguistics can contribute to studies in critical discourse analysis.