Representations of Climate Change. News and opinion discourse in UK and US quality press: a Corpus-Assisted Discourse Study

As a highly influential arena of debate at the crossroads between science and policymaking, media play a pivotal role in shaping public perception and opinion, particularly, on contentious issues, such as climate change. The book sets out to explore how climate change, one of the most pressing, eminently political issues of our time, is represented in newspaper discourse. It provides an empirical, comparative investigation on the mainstream UK and US press coverage of climate change (and related) topics from a linguistic and discursive perspective. The methodological framework makes synergic use of the tools of corpus linguistics with a discourse analytical perspective grounded on systemic functional linguistics. The analysis is conducted on a corpus of UK and US press articles published in 2007 - a key year in the history of climate change, coinciding with an upsurge of media attention. The study aims at highlighting some significant lexico-grammatical patterns as well as discursive and rhetorical strategies emerging from the analysis of both news and opinion discourse in the different newspapers under investigation.