The gulf of mexico oil spill a corpus based study of metaphors in british and american media discourse 1

This research focuses on the metaphorical framing of the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill that transpired from April 20 to July 28, 2010 in both American and British Online Newspaper Discourse..

CHAPTER 1 GENERAL OVERVIEW

1.1 Introduction

Language has not only been referred to as a “clear window”, but also

as a “refracting, structuring medium” (Fowler, 1991) This statement is especially apt in the context of media discourse where ideologies abound through the political stances and editorial perspectives adopted by the respective owners and advertisers This idea is clearly encapsulated by Charteris-Black’s (2004) assertion that since political and media discourse aim

to offer an idealised vision of the social world according to the dominant political viewpoint, metaphor choice is likely to be overt and intentional Furthermore, when language is consumed as a Bakhtinian chain of full texts, the repetition of messages and message structures have a “habituating effect”, causing ideas to become normalised, eventually affecting the social attitudes and beliefs shared both by the audience and the producers of the mass media (Hodges & Nilep, 2007)

According to Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), metaphor shapes the people’s responses and perceptions Each metaphor highlights selected perceptions of reality and ignores others, thereby causing one to focus on the desired consequences of favoured representations or policies as determined by the parties in power In other words, each metaphor can be manipulated as a subtle way of highlighting what those in positions of power want the masses to believe while avoiding inconvenient facts that they

do not wish to face Thus, metaphors used by successful political leaders exploit both conscious and unconscious emotional associations in order to project particularly compelling representations of the speakers themselves or the nations/groups they lead and can be seen as an “engine for language change” (Charteris-Black, 2004, p.3) Chilton (1996) goes as far as to refer to metaphor as a “constitutive part of thought and society” as metaphorical thought is a universal property of the mind where abstract ideas are represented in an experientialist framework for purposes of communication and understanding (p.39)

This research focuses on the metaphorical framing of the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill that transpired from April 20 to July 28, 2010 in both American and British Online Newspaper Discourse In other words, a discourse-analytical approach that is interdisciplinary and encompasses the linguistic, conceptual and socio-cultural is mooted (Steen, 2010, p.49) This research aims to examine the evaluative stance of the issues and actors involved in framing a conflict between traditionally staunch allies The assumption is that this evaluative stance will be manifested through the metaphors conveyed in the analysis This thesis is inspired by Hardie, Koller, Rayson and Semino’s (2007) research in exploiting a Semantic Annotation Tool found within WMatrix (Rayson, 2008) for metaphor analysis In other words, this thesis aims to further describe and proposes to further modify the exploitation of integrated online concordancing tools for the systematic identification of metaphorical patterns in large datasets through the use of a new framework for metaphorical analysis This can be seen as an attempt to potentially extend and triangulate intuition-based manual analysis and the

concordancing of pre-selected search strings as a basis for discourse-analytical metaphor studies such as those carried out by Krennmayr (2011), Semino (2002, 2004, 2008, 2010, 2011), Koller et al (2008), Hardie et al (2007), Baker (2006), Bednarek (2006), Deignan (2005), Charteris-Black (2004, 2005), Musolff (2004a; 2004b), Cameron and Low (2003), Partington (1998) and Chilton (1996, 2004)

Hence, this thesis aims to build on the existing cognitive-linguistic approach to metaphor advocated by Lakoff & Johnson, and re-situate it in a more encompassing theoretical framework that takes these three inter-related aspects into account (Steen, 2011, p.27):

1 A novel adaptation of the linguistic approach (Pragglejaz

Group, 2007; Krennmayr, 2011)

2 The cognitive approach via conceptual structures e.g cross-domain mappings (Kovecses, 2011)

3 The communicative/social approach (Chilton, 1996, 2004;

Charteris-Black 2004; 2005; Mulsolff, 2004a; 2004b)

This will be done through the in-depth semi-automated analysis of a representative newspaper corpus via the use of a new proposed framework for metaphor identification and analysis

1.2 Research Objectives

The methodology adopted in this thesis amalgamates the corpus linguistic approach with conceptual metaphor theory and critical discourse analysis This means that the use of a representative corpus in tandem with concordances and its relevant statistical correlations and frequencies are used

as an empirical platform for the further analysis of the relations between entities, social meaning and discourse This is due to the fact that many recent studies have shown that the systematic analysis of metaphorical patterns in naturally occurring and representative data “raises further questions and leads

to further insights into metaphor as a linguistic and cognitive phenomenon” (Hardie et al., 2007, p.2) This thesis aims to extend existing corpus methodology in the examination of conceptual metaphors in large datasets through the use of two separate integrated online concordancing platforms This methodology involves the use of semantic annotations in WMatrix software (Rayson, 2008) and the use of the Word Sketch function in Sketch

Engine (Kilgarriff et al., 2004) in a procedure referred to as the Integrated-Approach to the Identification of Conceptual Metaphors (IICM) This

new proposed methodology has the potential to expand the identification and analysis of conceptual metaphors beyond the premise of manual intuition and pre-determined search strings At this juncture, it is important to acknowledge that earlier studies that utilise intensive manual analysis of representative data have made significant contributions to the advancement of discourse-based metaphor studies – and remain valuable and lauded references in the field However this new proposed methodology potentially enables the field to move

towards the “scalable investigation of open-ended sets of metaphoric expressions” (Koller et al., 2008)

The key proposed advantage of this discourse-analytical framework is that it is likely to be more productive than traditional methods of metaphor analysis and provides an inductive, empirical springboard to the mining of metaphors in a large representative data-set Hardie et al (2007) assert that their preliminary research shows that this method “yields two to three times more analysis than manual analysis” and that it is “no more time-consuming than a purely manual analysis” (p.11) Finally, this thesis also aims to add to a growing body of research on metaphor in actual contexts of use in a genre-specific comparative study

1.3 Background: The Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill (20 April – 28 July

2010)

Beyond Petroleum (BP PLC) is a British international oil and gas company based in London Founded in 1908, BP operates in more than 80 countries across six continents, providing its customers “with fuel for transportation, energy for heat and light, retail services and petrochemicals products” (BP, 2012) It is the third largest oil company in the world, with 83,400 employees worldwide as of December 2011, sales of $375,517 million

in 2011 and a market value, even after the recent losses, of more than $100 billion It is has a market capitalization of £81.4 billion and is the fourth largest company in the world listed on the London Stock Exchange as of 6 July 2012 It has branded itself as “Beyond Petroleum”, an environmentally

conscious energy company that aims to “work in ways that will benefit communities and habitats and earn the world’s respect” by identifying and growing low-carbon businesses (BP, 2012) However, its image and its future financial prospects have been negatively impacted by the oil spill in the Gulf

of Mexico caused by the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon, a drilling rig leased by BP on April 20, 2010 A rupture in a pipe a mile into the sea spewed

an estimated five million barrels of oil, making it “the largest accidental oil spill in history” (Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2010)

According to research by the Project for Excellence in Journalism (2010) (henceforth PEJ), most disasters covered by the media generate an initial significant burst of media attention before dropping out of the headlines But the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill was a disaster that captured the public’s attention and far exceeded the usual media attention span From April 20 to July 28, the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill dominated every other story in the mainstream media in terms of salience and frequency It accounted for 22% of the news covered in America, dwarfing the coverage of the next most salient issue, the economy at 12% Furthermore, the Gulf saga registered as the number one story in the mainstream news agenda in nine of those fourteen weeks—and it never fell out of the top three (PEJ, 2010)

According to PEJ (2010), the coverage of the key storylines examined the following:

1 The environmental and economic impact of the spill

2 The examination of BP’s role and responsibility in the disaster

3 The US government’s actions and responses during the crisis—with much of the focus on the Obama administration

The narrative in the press focused on BP’s culpability in the spill as well as the way its executives responded to the aftermath BP’s lack of transparency in its estimates of the damage, the attitude of its then-CEO, Tony Hayward as well

as its immediate responses to the needs of the Gulf residents accounted for most of the negative media coverage Other legal repercussions as a result of these measures included a 50% loss in value of BP shares, the initiation of possible criminal and civil charges against BP pertaining to the spill, the resignation of Tony Hayward as BP’s chief executive and the promotion of his subsequent replacement, American Robert Dudley

It is important to note that this thesis is meant as a synchronic analysis

or a snapshot of the metaphorical evaluation of the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill as expressed through American and British media discourse This is due to the specific timeframe of the disaster in 2010, ranging from April 20, the day the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, to July 28, the day BP CEO; Tony Hayward’s departure was announced Online newspaper articles were collected from 20 April up till 31December 2010 in order to capture the full range of metaphorical sentiments expressed pertaining to this disaster during this period This was because the event was viewed as one of the most significant events in 2010

1.4 Data Collection: The Broadsheets

In order to investigate the range of metaphors and the metaphoricity of the texts, 250 separate articles directly related to the BP Oil Spill in the Gulf of

Mexico were collected from each online newspaper database These articles

came from electronic versions of the respective newspapers collected from Factiva between 21 April and 31December 2010 Even though the oil spill was fully capped on 28 July, newspaper articles were collected till 31 December in order to fully capture the entire range of sentiments pertaining to the oil spill as it was widely viewed as one of the most significant events in

2010 The corpus collection was carried out by utilizing the Boolean search

function on Factiva where all instances of the keywords containing “BP” or

“Beyond Petroleum” and “Gulf of Mexico” or “Deepwater Horizon” were

identified and surfaced in a chronological listing (see Fig 1.1-1.6) In a procedure that is similar to Bednarek’s (2006) selection process for the analysis of evaluation in newspaper discourse, articles were eliminated if the key words within them were incidental and peripheral instead of being central

to the topic itself Newspaper Headlines, the Deck (secondary headline containing additional information on the story), Captions (under key photographs related to the oil spill) and the textual content were collected for further metaphorical analysis As such, due to the extensiveness and reliability

of the Factiva search engine for each broadsheet, the corpus sample is of sufficient size, breadth and synchronic range to identify metaphors and conceptual metaphors used throughout the duration of the disaster Hence, the corpus collection process involves a selected cross-section of all oil spill stories from 21 April through to 31 December 2010 The news stories were considered to be oil spill stories if 50% or more of the story was on that topic

Fig.1.1

Screen Shot for Search Builder on Factiva: ‘Guardian‘

Fig.1.2

Screen Shot of search results on Factiva: ‘Guardian‘

Fig 1.3

Screen Shot for Search Builder on Factiva: ‘New York Times‘

Fig 1.4

Screen Shot of search results on Factiva: ‘New York Times‘

Fig 1.5

Screen Shot of search results on Factiva: ‘Washington Post‘

Fig 1.6

Screen Shot of search results on Factiva: ‘The Daily Telegraph‘

1.4.1 The Corpus

Even though British and American broadsheets are seen as “the fourth estate”, where the newspaper owners and advertisers are, in principle, free from government interference, it is important to note that news proprietors have the “power to influence the content, the political stance and the editorial perspective of the paper” through the appointment of senior editorial staff The proprietors also tend to exercise their rights to “greater or lesser degrees” (Bednarek, 2006, p.13) Hence, the metaphorical evaluation carried out in this thesis aims to capture the effect that differing cultural perspectives and political affiliations assert on the use of metaphor It is important to note that while the range of metaphors obtained from these 250 articles per broadsheet