The news media play an important role in effectively communicating public health crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic in that the framing of news stories can greatly influence public attitudes, behaviors, and their response to such crises. Underpinned by a deductive corpus-based analysis of frames, this study combines quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate COVID-19 news framing by China Daily in the initial 3 months. It demonstrates the integration of keywords and collocations to examine how China Daily frames COVID-19 at the early stage of the pandemic. It is achieved by drawing on the four functions of communication and categorizing the keywords into semantic sets to identify the framing patterns in a deductive way. The analysis reveals that Severity frame and Action frame are identified as the most dominant, followed by Economic frame and Blaming frame. These framing patterns shows how China Daily uses news discourse to construct a positive China’s image by prioritizing the crisis severity and action response over the economic consequences, and employing blaming discourse for self-clarification in the face of stigma. The analysis helps to demonstrate the effectiveness of corpus linguistics in exploring media framing and illuminates the specific understanding of the news environment and ideological consolidation within the context of China.

This study employs corpus-based ecological discourse analysis to explore representations of the ecological attitudes in English-language news reports on China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in China, India, and the United States from 2013 to 2022. It reveals the media’s perception and attitude towards the BRI in these nations. The analysis reveals that media outlets in each country project different ecological stances using varied attitudinal resources. The Chinese media frequently deploy beneficial attitudinal resources to highlight the BRI’s achievements and advocate for broader international engagement. In contrast, the Indian media exhibit a balanced usage of beneficial, neutral, and destructive attitudinal resources, reflecting a prudent and observant attitude towards the BRI. The American media corpus displays a greater prevalence of neutral and destructive attitudinal representations over beneficial ones, suggesting a comparatively skeptical reception of the initiative. The study argues that these divergent patterns of ecological attitudes and the selection of attitudinal resources are shaped by factors such as economic development, geographical context, and social values.

Abstract This article presents the findings of a corpus-based diachronic discourse study of the representations of the causes of and solutions to China’s air pollution in the official Chinese English-language China Daily (2008–2018) with a view to exploring agency for both causal responsibility and treatment responsibility. The findings reveal that greater prominence is given to treatment responsibility than to causal responsibility. Causal responsibility is mainly attributed to no agents or to physical agents, while treatment responsibility is chiefly assigned to social agents. In addition, a transitivity analysis shows that causer agents are primarily represented by Actors in material processes and Tokens in relational processes, whereas solver agents are principally represented by Actors in material processes, Tokens and Carriers in relational processes, Sensers in mental processes, and Sayers in verbal processes. It is argued that these linguistic features are linked to socio-political factors within which the press operates.

Abstract This paper explores an interpersonal framework for international ecological discourse analysis using systemic functional linguistics. It shows that the sub-categories of the functional interpersonal framework need to be extended in terms of delicacy along the ecological cline to construe the ecological features in the context under investigation. The extension can be achieved through an integration of the following ecological parameters into a functional framework: a system of international ecological factors, a system of international ecological environment, and the international ecosophy “多元和谐, 交互共生” (duoyuan hexie, jiaohu gongsheng, ‘diversity and harmony, interaction and co-existence’). This integration builds an “ecological” interpersonal framework for international ecological discourse analysis, which is composed of an “ecological” Mood system, an “ecological” Modality system, and an “ecological” Appraisal system. The construction of an ecological interpersonal framework is accompanied by specific case analysis.

Expressions of War in Australia and the Pacific: Language, Trauma, Memory, and Official Discourse is a volume of Palgrave Studies in Languages at War, which aims to ‘explore specific conflict situa...

This article reviews Taboo in discourse: Studies on attenuation and offence in communication 978-3-0343-3018-3