A critical discourse analysis of english media texts on climate change

Despite such a body of literature, however, to our best knowledge, virtually no study has focused on the linguistic realizations of the ideologies about the developed and developing coun

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI

UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES

  

LƯU THỊ KIM NHUNG

A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

OF ENGLISH MEDIA TEXTS ON CLIMATE CHANGE

A thesis submitted to the University of Languages and International Studies

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Field: English Linguistics Code: 62 22 15 01

Hanoi, 2016

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES

  

LƯU THỊ KIM NHUNG

A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

OF ENGLISH MEDIA TEXTS ON CLIMATE CHANGE

A thesis submitted to the University of Languages and International Studies

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Field: English Linguistics Code: 62 22 15 01

Supervisors: Ha Cam Tam, Ph.D

Tran Xuan Diep, Asso Prof Ph.D

Hanoi, 2016

The copyright of this thesis rests with the author Quotation from it is permitted, provided that full acknowledgement is made This thesis may not be reproduced without my prior written consent

I warrant that this authorization does not, to the best of my belief, infringe the rights

of any third party

Hanoi, 18th May, 2016 Signature

Luu Thi Kim Nhung

The linguistic features of lexical choice, lexical relation, metaphor, passivization, nominalization and modality were found ideologically invested in the newspapers‘ portrayal of the power relation and ideologies Also, the ideologies and the language features that conveyed these ideologies were influenced by the two media outlets‘ political commitments, news values, news agenda, and the socio-economic and historical background that embedded the discourse All in all, the media bolstered the asymmetrical power nexus and the ideologies about the responsibilities for climate change in the interest of the developed nations

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Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I am especially indebted to my supervisors, Doctor Ha Cam Tam and Associate Professor Tran Xuan Diep, for their challenging questions, immeasurable guidance and support through every stage of my PhD journey so far

I do really appreciate their astute advice, kind encouragement and insightful feedback on my work

I would like to extend my sincerest thanks to Professor Nguyen Hoa, Professor Hoang Van Van, Associate Professor Le Hung Tien, Professor Nguyen Quang, who, in one way or another, have inspired me into the field of linguistics in general and critical discourse analysis in particular; to Doctor Huynh Anh Tuan, Associate Professor Ngo Huu Hoang, Associate Professor Nguyen Van Do, and numerous other lecturers at University of Languages and International Studies, Vietnam National University, Hanoi for their immensely helpful guidance and support during

my study

I would also like to thank the Faculty of Postgraduate Studies, University of Languages and International Studies, and all its staff members for their constant supply of information and advice on stages of my study; my fellow graduate students who have built such a pleasant community to be part of

I am really grateful to my colleagues at Faculty of English in particular, at Hanoi National University of Education in general, for supporting me throughout my study

My final but definitely not least thanks go to my beloved big family for their unconditional support all along the way I am particularly indebted to my late father for his absolute confidence in my learning capacity and my devoted mother for guiding me into this field of study since my very early years in life A special thank goes to my husband for showing his continuing concern during my studies and beyond Ultimately, a most loving thank to my son and daughter for their always being proud of their mom, and for always being there to remind me of the real significance in life

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List of Tables and Figures

Table 2.1 Time frame for data collection 51

Table 2.2 Adjectival collocates of the nodewords ―countries,‖ ―nations,‖ and ―states‖ 53

Table 2.3 Collocation profile of the nodewords ―developed countries‖ in The Independent corpus 55

Table 2.4 Part of the concordance lines for the nodewords ―developing countries‖ in The Independent corpus 57

Table 2.5 Elements in the research design 64

Table 3 Summary of language features in Chapter 3 94

Table 4 Summary of language features in Chapter 4 124

Table 5 Summary of language features in Chapter 5 142

Figure 1 Discourse as text, interaction and context (Fairclough, 1989) 32

Figure 2 Analytical procedure 65

Figure 3 Total tokens in the study corpora 68

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List of Abbreviations

CDA critical discourse analysis

COP Conference of the Parties

DHA

EU

Discourse-Historical Approach European Union

IPCC Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

OECD Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development NYTC The New York Times corpus

UN FCCC United Nations Framework Convention on Climate

Change

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CONTENTS

Declaration i

Abstract ii

Acknowledgements iii

List of Tables and Figures iv

List of Abbreviations v

CONTENTS vi

INTRODUCTION 1

1 Rationale for the study 1

2 Aim and objectives of the study 3

3 Research questions 4

4 Significance of the study 4

5 Contextual background 5

Social context 5

Discursive practices 11

6 Methodological considerations 13

7 Scope of the study 14

8 Structure of the thesis 15

CHAPTER 1 LITERATURE REVIEW 17

1.1 Critical Discourse Analysis 17

1.1.1 Basic notions in CDA 18

1.1.2 Major tenets in CDA 23

1.1.3 CDA as a Conceptual Framework and Methodology 26

1.1.4 Critiques of CDA 34

1.2 Corpus techniques in CDA 35

1.3 Previous research on climate change discourse 37

1.3.1 Content analysis of media discourse on global warming and/or climate change 37

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1.3.2 Discourse analysis of media discourse on global warming and/or climate

change 38

1.3.3 CDA of media discourse on global warming and/or climate change 39

CHAPTER 2 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 48

2.1 Research questions 48

2.2 The study corpora 48

2.2.1 The sources 48

2.2.2 Corpus compilation 50

2.3 Analytical framework 51

2.3.1 Corpus tools used in this study 52

2.3.2 Fairclough‘s Dialectical-Relational analytical framework adopted in this study 58

CHAPTER 3 POWER RELATION 67

3.1 Newsworthiness of the COPs in The Independent and The New York Times 68

3.2 The contextual background 69

3.3 The unity discourse 71

3.4 The conflict discourse 75

3.4.1 The conflict between the developed and developing countries 76

3.4.2 The conflict among the developed, developing, and small countries 90

CHAPTER 4 THE DEVELOPED COUNTRIES’ RESPONSIBILITY FOR CLIMATE CHANGE 96

4.1 The developed countries‘ responsibility for climate change 98

4.2 The developed countries‘ responsibility for climate change is a possibility, not a reality 105

4.3 The developed countries‘ attitudes towards their responsibility 107

CHAPTER 5 THE DEVELOPING COUNTRIES’ RESPONSIBILITY FOR CLIMATE CHANGE 126

5.1 The developing countries‘ responsibility for climate change 127

5.2 The developing countries‘ attitudes towards their responsibility 134

5.3 The developing countries‘ demands 137

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CONCLUSION 143

1 Recapitulation 143

2 Implications 151

2.1 Theoretical implications 151

2.2 Methodological implications 153

2.3 Practical implications 154

2.3.1 For the media 154

2.3.2 For education 156

3 Limitations 156

4 Suggestions for further research 157

REFERENCES 160 APPENDIX CLXXII

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INTRODUCTION

1 Rationale for the study

This research work originated in our interest in the climate change issues and the applicability of critical discourse analysis in exploring the manipulative power exercised through media discourse on climate change

Climate change has been considered one of the most crucial challenges that faces every nation of the world today (see Betsill and Bulkeley, 2004; de Blij, 2005; Dow and Downing, 2007; Hoffman and Woody, 2008; Held, Theros and Fane-Hervey, 2011; Singer, 2011; Filho and Manolas, 2012; Klein, 2014; Dunlap and Brulle, 2015; to name but a few) It has adversely affected the lives of all people, regardless of their socio-economic status As a globally comprehensive response to climate change, the annual United Nations Framework Convention on

Climate Change‘s (UNFCCC) Conferences of the Parties (COPs) – the biggest

international climate conferences - have been going on for over twenty years now Every year, assurances are said and expectations are raised but only partial solutions are produced and little is achieved in terms of concrete tangible outcomes As the world is becoming ever more polarized between the developed and the developing countries, the rich and the poor countries, even among the rich developed countries themselves and among the developing countries themselves, more and more parties with conflicting interests and benefits are joining the negotiation table at the climate conferences Particularly, when the issues of responsibility distribution and economic contribution have become more apparent on the agenda of the conferences, such conflicting interests and benefits have contributed to the increased complexity and complication of the contested global debates about climate change issues Certainly, such a pivotal issue in such a lengthy process involving so many governments and people must definitely resort to particular

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linguistic and discursive means in the media to justify the different parties‘ interests, attitudes and behaviors in ways that they appear fair on the one hand and avoid or delay taking action for their own benefits on the other hand The situation inspires

us to conduct this research to uncover how media language has been manipulated to convey the power relation between the developed and developing countries as well

as their responsibilities for climate change

As the climate change debate has become such a globally sophisticated arena, multiple voices are getting heard Among them, linguists have delved into the analyses of rhetorical devices, discourse strategies, metaphors, framing, and other

aspects of text and talk on climate change Typical examples include Arnal et al

(2014), Boykoff and Boykoff (2004, 2007), Carvalho (2005, 2007), Doulton and Brown (2009), Ereaut and Segnit (2006), Grundmann and Krishnamurthy (2010), Moser and Dilling (2004, 2007), Nerlich and Koteyko (2009, 2011), Painter (2011),

Thaker and Leiserowitz (2014), Tillinghast and McCann (2013), Ukonu et al

(2013), Wang (2009), Ward (2008), Wodak and Meyer (2012) who have all commented on the significance of the language used in communicating climate change issues Despite such a body of literature, however, to our best knowledge, virtually no study has focused on the linguistic realizations of the ideologies about the developed and developing countries‘ responsibilities for climate change which are discursively constructed in the media so as to interpret and explain these countries‘ attitudes, behaviours and actions at the global climate debate In consideration of the increasingly changing power relations among countries in the world, we believe it is significant to conduct a systematic and critical (discourse) analysis employing linguistic tools with a fairly large sample of media language focusing on the developed and developing countries at the global climate conferences In so doing, it is expected that the media‘s use of language and the ideologies about these dichotomous countries‘ responsibilities for climate change will be deciphered through the lens of the discursive and social practices that embed the language in the media

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2 Aim and objectives of the study

According to the prominent CDA scholars, such as Billig, Chilton, Fairclough, van Dijk, van Leeuwen, and Wodak, one of the most significant purposes of CDA is

to decode the ideology embedded in language use Considering discourse a form of social practice, critical discourse analysts attempt to uncover the reciprocal influences of language and social structure (see Fairclough, 1989, 2015; van Dijk, 1993) Also, CDA aims ―to unmask ideologically permeated and often obscured structures of power, political control and dominance as well as strategies of discriminatory inclusion and exclusion in language use‖ (Wodak, de Cillia, Reisigl and Liebhart, 1999: 8) It could, hence, be deducted that ideology and power relations are of great importance in CDA research

On account of the issues stated in the rationale for this study and in line with the main purpose and aim of CDA, this study was set out to uncover the ideologically contested power relation(s) between the developed and developing countries at the global climate conferences as well as the ideologies about these countries‘ responsibilities for climate change, which are manifested in the English media discourse on climate change under study In particular, we will analyze how the developed-developing countries‘ power relation and the ideologies about these countries‘ responsibilities for climate change are constructed via the language in

The Independent and The New York Times‟ newspapers Therefore, the objectives of

the study are:

- to analyze the linguistic features in the English media discourse on climate change under study and uncover the power relation(s) between the developed and developing countries at the global climate conferences; and

- to analyze the linguistic features in the discourse and decode the ideologies about the developed and developing countries‘ responsibilities for climate change conveyed via the discourse; and

- to interpret and explain the power relation(s) between the developed and developing countries and the ideologies about these countries‘ responsibilities

1 What kind of power relation between the developed and developing countries

is constructed in the English media discourse under study? How is this relation linguistically manifested via the discourse?

2 What are the ideologies about the developed and developing countries‘ responsibilities for climate change? How are these ideologies linguistically manifested via the English media discourse under study?

4 Significance of the study

From a practical perspective, this research work is expected to contribute to an enhanced understanding of a global concern about the international climate conferences during the period 2004 – 2013 and the newspapers‘ ideologies about the developed and developing countries‘ responsibilities for climate change More importantly, it is hoped that, as a critical analysis of media discourse, the research will help the newspapers‘ readers see the manipulative power of the media so as to become critical in their reading of the news

From a methodological point of view, this study seeks to not only contribute to

an enhanced understanding of how to apply and extend the methodology of CDA, but also to offer insights into the benefits of using corpus techniques to support CDA

From a pedagogical perspective, the findings of the study can be used as a reference for schools and other educational institutions in establishing their educational programs about climate change and critical reading It is also important

Social context

Climate change officially emerged on the world‘s agenda at the Earth Summit

in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, which agreed on the importance of the problem and created a framework, the UNFCCC, for international action, although it left actual policy recommendations mostly for the future Being the most prominent spokesperson on the state of climate change(1), the UNFCCC aims at preventing humans‘ dangerous interventions into climate In 1995, there were international talks in order to urge the whole world to respond to climate change In 1997, the UNFCCC met in Kyoto (Japan) and approved of the Kyoto Protocol But it was not until 2005 that the protocol came into effect Under this protocol, industrialized countries are encouraged to reduce their greenhouse gases emissions to 5% below

1990 levels to keep the global temperature within 2°C above pre-industrial levels Although the Kyoto protocol has been widely criticized as a weak and indecisive agreement, it is the strongest international legal framework that the world‘s countries have so far been able to agree upon For the time being, however, there are quite different attitudes towards the protocol On the one hand, the rich industrialized countries in the European Union, including Britain, were pioneers and have achieved certain success in reducing greenhouse gases emissions On the other hand, such countries as the United States, Canada and Australia have been really reluctant to commit to the targets in the Kyoto protocol for fear that these targets

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might constrain their future economic growth, or there might be even further requirements for deeper emissions cuts in the future On the other hand, many developing countries are fearful that some of the positive features of the Kyoto protocol would be lost if a new treaty were agreed Because climate change is a complicated global issue that requires comprehensively concerted actions of every nation in the world, the efforts of some countries have not been sufficient to respond

to the increasing climate-related problems This has resulted in a slow progress in the emissions cuts agendas Thus, even though the national targets were met, it would not be enough to offset the rapidly increasing emissions from other countries without further legal commitments on a global basis Lately, the EU‘s, particularly the UK‘s, role in the climate change arena has diminished, along with the delayed action or inaction on the part of other developed countries Consequently, the whole process of the global climate negotiations has been the target of criticism primarily for being very slow and deficient in relation to the urgency it calls for

The incapability of governments to forge meaningful and effective progress in these climate talks has historically been attributed to the prevalent divide and conflict between the developed and the developing countries that the climate regime portrays (Parks and Roberts, 2010) This divide influences not only the climate conferences but also the whole global decision-making structure due to the differing interests of countries involved The socio-economic development gap between the rich developed countries and the poor developing countries, as defined by the Human Development Index2, has defined the countries‘ interests Sharing similar past experience as colonies, the developing nations employ the arguments that are linked to the developed countries‘ historical atrocities towards the environment Therefore, they consistently insist that the developed countries provide them with financial aid and lead the global fight against climate change Also, with their social identification as past colonies, the developing countries often assemble with similarly disadvantaged peers to form a force that would increase the group‘s

2 http://hdr.undp.org/en/content/human-development-index-hdi

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political leverage at the global climate debate Such coalitions can help the developing countries set the framework for future negotiations, too (Penetrante,

2010, 2011) The various coalitions such as the G77+China, BASIC, AOSIS, and so

on provide the developing countries with a negotiation position to ensure equal footage with the developed countries and challenge the current principles, norms and rules that underpin international economic order and power structures

The divide between the developed and the developing world has been mainly determined by the countries‘ positions on who should pay for the costs of mitigating and adapting to climate change, and how much should be paid (see Beyerlin, 2006; Mejia, 2010; Penetrante, 2010, 2013) Such climate-related costs include direct investments into low emission technologies, technology transfer, and the opportunity costs brought about by abandoning cheaper, higher emission technologies These positions result from the countries‘ perceptions of justice and fairness following considerations of their own domestic circumstances The multidimensionality of climate change as well as the diversity of nations‘ historical experiences leads to a diversity of paradigms, implicating differences in notions of justice and fairness (Zartman, 2003: 34, cited in Hernández, 2014) For the rich developed world, a fair and just climate policy employs mandatory emissions reductions that would not distort sound competition between future generations from the developed and the developing countries (Schelling, 1995; Posner and Weisbach, 2010, cited in Hernández, 2014) Therefore, responsibilities for the climate issue should not be shouldered by the developed countries alone, but the developing countries, particularly the fast-growing countries, must also adopt concrete emission reduction targets For the developing world, on the contrary, the fairness of a climate policy has to take into account the developed countries‘ historical contribution of greenhouse gases and the poor developing countries‘ sufferings

However, as the world is changing dynamically, the UNFCCC distinction between the developed (Annex I and II) countries and the developing (Non-Annex)

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countries no longer reflects these countries‘ current development status Despite their currently higher per capita income, such nations as South Korea, Singapore, Israel, and Saudi Arabia are still not in the Annex list due to political considerations Similarly, the OECD members like Mexico and Chile should have been listed as Annex II countries In the same manner, Brazil, Argentina, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Turkey, South Africa and South Korea are members of the G20, which is the bloc of leading industrialized nations of the world, but they follow different preferences and expectations as to how they should contribute to the global climate issues

Another issue of consideration is that the developed, like the developing world,

is a not a homogeneous entity Despite their common characteristic of earning high per capita income and advanced economic development level, the developed countries do not necessarily pursue the same interests There is also a huge difference in these countries‘ approaches in dealing with the developing countries such as China and India (Yamin and Depledge, 2004: 45-46)

In the post-Kyoto climate conferences, the developed world seeks to replace the protocol which does not oblige the developing countries with binding commitments, because the developed countries see their rights of development undermined by legally binding gases emission reduction schemes under the Kyoto protocol‘s principle of common but differentiated responsibilities The developed nations, while addressing the developing countries‘ concerns, call upon the developing countries to commit to concrete comparable efforts and suggest timelines for future commitments to ensure the effectiveness of the gases emission reduction schemes Furthermore, as they fear the attempts to reduce gases emissions might negatively affect their economies, many developed countries call for more flexibility mechanisms so that they can achieve the emissions targets without jeopardizing their economic competitive edge

At Copenhagen conference in 2009, the developed and developing countries pledged to their relevant reduction targets and mitigation actions Also, the

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developed countries committed to provide approximately $30 billion of immediate fast start funding over the period 2010 - 2012 to support the developing countries‘ mitigation and adaptation to climate change Moreover, the rich developed countries committed to work towards long-term public and private climate finance flows reaching $100 billion a year by 2020 However, as these were just pledges, the divide and conflict between the developed and developing countries at the global climate conferences was more evident at COP15, where the developed countries insisted that the developing countries, especially China and India, participate in all legally binding post-Kyoto emission reduction mechanisms, or at least try to reduce greenhouse gases emissions to levels comparable with those of the developed countries The developing countries, conversely, defended the benefits they had with the exemptions they were granted in the UNFCCC and the Kyoto protocol All in all, the conflict between countries‘ economic goals and immediate need for climate safety has made it hardly possible for parties at the global climate conferences to reach a stronger agreement than the Kyoto protocol Thus far, countries have followed different agendas to climate change The UK‘s government has taken a number of steps to limit the UK‘s emissions of greenhouse gases through legally binding targets The country has endorsed the Kyoto protocol and passed the Climate Change Act, establishing a framework to develop an economically credible emissions reduction path The UK‘s leadership was strengthened internationally by highlighting its role in contributing to urgent collective action to tackle climate change under the Kyoto protocol However, its perceived credibility has declined as the economic crisis has led to a more negative attitude towards climate-policy proposals which may undermine the country‘s competitive edge As a consequence, much of the UK‘s climate policy has fallen short of expectations Due to its recent gloomy realities, the UK‘s government has now increased its international push for deeper climate cooperation Also, when the economy tends to be constrained by carbon reducing policy instruments, industry holds a firm grip on the UK politicians and reacts strongly against the emissions targets Hence, the politicians‘ opinion changes in favour of emissions trading

to the UNFCCC Party Groupings3, this country neither commits to emissions reduction nor agrees to binding international agreements that do not commit developing countries Moreover, the Republican majority in the U.S Congress influences the U.S climate negotiators at the international climate conferences in ways that the U.S has been seen as being less interested in taking action than many other rich countries despite the country's rising level of carbon emissions On top of these, considering themselves representatives of a powerful country with global interests, the U.S climate negotiators tend to exert super power on the COPs and skew the conferences in their nation‘s favour

The rapidly developing nations, such as China, India, and Brazil, take their own routes to climate change, too Over the last decade, the pattern of the world‘s economy has changed dramatically, leading to the restructuring of international power nexus The rapidly developing countries are now considered strong economies, hence are demanded to take more responsibility for their own gases emissions in particular, and for climate change in general In line of this reasoning, the Kyoto protocol is perceived by the developed countries as no longer appropriate and the fast-growing countries are no longer eligible for financial aid from the developed countries Nevertheless, from its own perspective, China has enacted rules to curb air pollution China demands that the global climate negotiations

3http://unfccc.int/parties_and_observers/parties/negotiating_groups/items/2714.php

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address developing countries‘ needs and wants to maintain the ―binary distinction between developed and developing countries‖ (UNFCCC Party Groupings) as stated in the Kyoto protocol

Such a lengthy process of climate debate with so many conflicting interests has attracted heavy media attention from around the world Also, the developed countries‘ dominant ideologies are mediated through the language in their newspapers, as will be delineated in chapters 3, 4, and 5 of the thesis

Discursive practices

The dialectical process of production, dissemination and consumption of the newspaper articles can help explain the linguistic phenomena encoded in them In

this study, discursive practices mean The Independent and The New York Times‟

political commitments, the relation between the media (as an industry) and other industries, the media‘s view of the relation between themselves and the audience, their news agenda, and news values (see Richardson, 2007: 89-93)

With respect to the news production procedure, for a story to be published in the newspaper, it must go through a chain of selection First of all, a newspaper‘s political commitments and the audience‘s expectations of its reportage are of crucial influence on the selection of articles to be published, and therefore, on shaping their readers‘ opinion on the global climate change debate In the UK, the audience expects the media to report on different independent voices rather than deliberately emphasize individuals with differing opinions The British press has a tendency of

offering ―a wide range of perspectives to its readers‖ (Goddard et al., 2008: 12) In terms of its political commitments, ―The Independent leans towards the Labour

Party but often oscillates somewhat to the right‖ (Carvalho, 2007: 226; see also Hulme, 2007) As a centrist newspaper, it commits both to an economically neoliberal ideology and a social democratic ideology (Carvalho and Burguess,

2005) That is, The Independent‟s ideological lines often sway between the two

poles: (1) a neoliberal ideology which frames climate change as a global threat that requires every country to share the burden; and (2) a social democratic ideology

12

with a precautionary approach to climate change, global equity and socially shared responsibility (Carvalho, 2005, 2007; Carvalho and Burgess, 2005) What is more, the newspaper declares in its Code of Conduct to commit to ―high journalistic standards,‖4 placing itself at a quality newspaper position

In a different manner from the UK media practice, the U.S audience demands

for objectivity and equal coverage of divergent voices on all sides of a debate The New York Times is considered a liberal capitalist newspaper, being just a little more

to the left (Gentzkow and Shapiro, 2010: 47) Additionally, rooting as a hometown

paper of New York City, The New York Times adheres to cosmopolitanism and

balanced reporting That is, the newspaper sticks to the ideology of all human ethnic groups belonging to a community based on a shared morality, a shared economic relationship, or a political structure that encompasses different parties (Boykoff and

Boykoff, 2004: 134) As such, The New York Times addresses ―both sides of the

story‖ in presenting the news stories on the controversial climate change debate and

in claiming the climate change issue is unresolved, consequently causing confusion

in the general public understanding of the UNFCCC‘s climate conferences Through balanced reporting, the urgency of the real issue of climate change is stressed at times but more often is blurred by the controversy over the question of who and how the responsibility for climate-related problems are distributed among countries Also, the newspaper emphasizes conflicts between the politicians of the developed and the developing world, between the moral challenge of taking action and the potential negative impacts of the international climate change policy on national economic competitiveness

Another noteworthy discursive feature is The New York Times‟ viewpoint regarding its reporting on environmental issues Differently from The Independent and many other broadsheets in the U.S., since 2009, The New York Times has

developed an environmental cluster, and dedicated a section editor to manage a team of environment reporters and to attend the daily Page One news meetings for

4 http://www.independent.co.uk/service/code-of-conduct-a6184241.html

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the newspaper This placed an advocate for environment-related news in the newspaper‘s agenda and selection of news The environmental cluster enables the newspaper to report more systematically about climate change issues and exerts an agenda-setting effect on the newspaper‘s reportage of the matters

In addition to the issues competing to appear in the news, there is a harsh competition among key stakeholders such as politicians, environmental activist groups, economic think tanks, scientists, fossil fuel industry to take control of the issue of climate change when it is communicated through the media to the public (Boykoff and Roberts, 2007) Pursuing their own interests, these stakeholders attempt to fund campaigns to skew the global climate conferences in their favour For instance, politicians and government officials are generally thought to be credible sources of information; the fossil fuel industry runs public relations campaigns – all of which are facilitated by professional journalistic practices

6 Methodological considerations

To answer the research questions, the present study looked at both quantitative and qualitative dimensions of data, but focused mainly on the qualitative, from a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis approach There are two main reasons for this First, for the analysis of such a complex issue as the global climate politics, CDA is really compatible because of its major interest in studying the use of language in socio-economic political contexts and incorporating concepts from other disciplines Second, corpus techniques make it possible to obtain reliable evidence from a fairly large sample of data and to reveal language patterns that are hard to detect by merely manual analysis

Specifically, Norman Fairclough‘s (1989, 1995a) Dialectical-Relational Approach to CDA and corpus techniques (frequency, collocation, concordance)

were utilized in analyzing The Independent and The New York Times‟ news articles

covering the ten consecutive international climate conferences, from COP10 in

2004 to COP19 in 2013 The data for analysis consisted of two study corpora: one

comprising the articles in The Independent and the other comprising the articles in

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The New York Times published during and around the time spans of the COPs Each

of the sample articles contains at least one key phrase „climate change.‘ The articles

were skimmed to ensure that they actually covered the climate conferences First,

the corpus software Wordsmith Tools 6.0 (Scott, 2012) was employed to identify the

collocation profiles of the nodes ―developed,‖ ―developing,‖ ―rich,‖ and ―poor‖ countries These collocation profiles of the nodes provided a bird-eye‘s view of the prominent ideas conveyed by the media Then, the qualitative analysis in accordance with Fairclough‘s (1995a) Dialectical-Relational approach to CDA was undertaken manually on the most frequent collocates of the nodes This qualitative analysis is the textual analysis of the concordances to examine the linguistic features (namely, lexical choices, lexical relations, passivization, metaphor, modality, nominalization) which manifest the power relation between the developed and developing countries in the global climate talks as well as the ideologies about these countries‘ responsibilities for climate change The concordances can be opened up to a whole-text view for investigation of the linguistic context Intertwined with the textual analysis, the discursive practices and the socio-economic and historical context that embedded the sample texts were analyzed to interpret and explain why the language was used the way it was described in the textual analysis

7 Scope of the study

The purpose of this study is to critically analyze the power relation between the developed and developing countries at the global climate conferences, to decode the ideologies about these countries‘ responsibilities for climate change, and how the

relation(s) as well as the ideologies are mediated through The Independent and The New York Times‟ news coverage of the climate conferences In consideration of all

factors that might affect the critical analysis, within this study, the English media

texts comprised articles from two national newspapers, namely The Independent and The New York Times There are two main reasons for this First, as indicated by

previous studies (for example, van Dijk, 1988; Fairclough, 1989), a government‘s political stance exerts significant influence on its national newspapers‘ reports of

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news events, and each news agency employs its own discursive strategies to manipulate its readers‘ attitudes and behaviours toward the issue Hence, it is possible to examine how the two newspapers‘ ideologies about the developed and developing countries‘ responsibilities for climate change are realized at the textual, discursive, and social levels in the media discourse analysis It is important to note

that, in this study, we did not focus on the comparison of The Independent and The New York Times‟ stances regarding the global climate debate, though similarities

and differences between the two newspapers were mentioned from time to time to represent the multiple depictions of the countries under scrutiny Second, these two newspapers are from two most important English-speaking countries, the UK and the US Therefore, the reliability of language and the representativeness of data can

be accounted for Even though the newspapers from other English-speaking countries, such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and so forth are all regarded as English media, they are not considered in this research so as to ensure the qualitative analysis to be in-depth and focus on the ideologies of the newspapers under study within the space constrains of the thesis

Another noteworthy point is that the study focuses on The Independent and The New York Times‟ coverage of ten consecutive UNFCCC COPs rather than the

coverage of all climate change events during the surveyed period for two main reasons First, the COP is the supreme decision-making body of the UNFCCC which has near-universal membership Second, COPs are held annually with the participation of almost 200 countries around the world and attract really enormous attention from media representatives Thus, the coverage of the consecutive COPs provides sufficient data across the media through time for the purpose of the study

8 Structure of the thesis

This thesis is structured into three main parts, as follows:

The first part, Introduction, gives the reader an overview of the study through the rationale for the study, the research aim and objectives, the research questions,

as well as of the discursive practices and the socio-economic, political contexts that embedded the study discourse In particular, Chapter 3 presents and discusses the findings on the power relation between the developed and developing countries at the global climate conferences and their linguistic, discursive realizations in the study discourse Chapters 4 discusses the findings on the ideologies about the developed countries‘ responsibility for climate change, and their linguistic, discursive manifestations in the study discourse Chapter 5 focuses on the ideologies about the developing countries‘ responsibility for climate change and their manifestations in the discourse

The part of Conclusion summarizes the major findings and the research work performed It also provides recommendations as to how this study can contribute to the current literature on climate change research, to CDA methodology, as well as

to media and education Finally, this part comments on the limitations of this study

and provides suggestions for further research

The chapter is divided into three sections Section 1.1 gives an account of the basic notions as well as the major tenets in CDA that are relevant to the study, and examines the predominant approaches to CDA, focusing particularly on the one that mainly informs the present study Section 1.2 gives a brief overview of corpus techniques and discusses issues related to using them in the analysis of the thesis‘ data Section 1.3 critically reviews the previous studies that are relevant to the present study Finally is a brief summary of the fundamental literature locating the gap to be filled by the present study

1.1 Critical Discourse Analysis

Beginning to develop in the 1970s and 1980s (Fowler et al.,1979; Fairclough

1989), Critical Discourse Analysis has now firmly established its position within humanities and social sciences With its ―particular interest in the relationship between language and power‖ (Weiss and Wodak, 2002: 12), CDA primarily studies ―the way social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context‖ (van Dijk, 2001: 352) One of the ultimate goals of CDA research is to expose the manipulative strategies adopted by dominant groups to maintain social inequalities

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and injustices (Fairclough and Wodak, 1997; van Dijk, 2001) Also, CDA aims to decode the ideology embedded in the discourse (see Billig, Chilton, Fairclough, van Dijk, van Leeuwen, and Wodak)

CDA is not a school of one trend but rather a paradigm under the scope of which

we can find different approaches Therefore, it is hardly possible to find a single definition of CDA In terms of methodology, ―CDA involves a principled and transparent shunting backwards and forth between the microanalysis of texts using varied tools of linguistic, semiotic and literary analysis, and the macroanalysis of social formations, institutions and power relations that these texts index and construct‖ (Luke, 2002: 100)

These remarks on CDA raise a number of concerns about the basic notions of

―text,‖ ―discourse,‖ ―power,‖ ―ideology‖, ―critical‖, etc which will be explored with their relevance to the current study in the following section

1.1.1 Basic notions in CDA

Text

Because the sample newspaper articles on climate change are considered media

texts on climate change, it is necessary to clarify the term text as it is

operationalized in the study as well as to explain why these newspaper articles are regarded as texts and thus as a part of the discourse on climate change

Text itself has been defined variedly, but this thesis adopts Fairclough‘s definition which considers text ―linguistic/semiotic elements of social events‖

(2005: 916) Research into media discourse within CDA has established the media

as a social and discursive institution which regulates and organizes social life, as well as the production of social knowledge, values and beliefs (van Dijk, 1993; Fairclough, 1995a) At the production end, the media texts are the products of the media which regulate and organize social life At the consumption end, the media texts produce social knowledge, values and beliefs when they reach and influence a large number of people The media texts on climate change under study are,

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therefore, the linguistic realizations of the issues at the global climate talks and are considered a power factor, with each text (that is, each sample newspaper article) being viewed as part of the social process of constructing the international climate

debate This connects the notion of text to the notion of discourse below

Discourse

Inheriting Michel Foucault‘s (1972) legacy of archeological method which studies discourse in the broader social context and the institutional practices where

it is produced, CDA scholars have thus far adopted the functionalist approach to

discourse (Schiffrin, 1994) This approach regards discourse as language in use, and

assumes that ―language is active,‖ ―is used to mean something and to do something

and that this ‗meaning‘ and ‗doing‘ are linked to the context of its usage‖ (Richardson, 2007: 24)

Following is one very popular definition of discourse in CDA, which is adopted

in this present study:

CDA sees discourse - language use in speech and writing - as a form of ‗social practice.‘ Describing discourse as social practice implies a dialectical relationship between a particular discursive event and the situation(s), institution(s) and social structure(s), which frame it The discursive event is shaped by them, but it also shapes them That is, discourse is socially constitutive as well as socially conditioned – it constitutes situations, objects of knowledge, and the social identities of and relationships between people and groups of people It is constitutive both in the sense that it helps to sustain and reproduce the social status quo, and in the sense that it contributes to transforming it Since discourse is socially consequential, it gives rise to important issues of power Discursive practices may have major ideological effects – that is, they can help produce and reproduce unequal power relations … through the ways in which they represent things and position people (Fairclough and Wodak, 1997: 258)

Context

In CDA, context is meant to involve not only the linguistic environment in which a language item is used within a text, but also the extra linguistic elements

up to a whole text view The discursive level involves the text's production and, to a lesser extent, the text‘s consumption And the social level focuses on the societal currents which influence the discourse

Social power

Of much interest to CDA is social power in discourse For CDA:

Social power is defined in terms of the control exercised by one group or organisation (or its members) over the actions and/or the minds of (the members of) another group, thus limiting the freedom of action of the others, or influencing their knowledge, attitudes or ideologies (van Dijk, 2004: 84)

According to van Dijk, discourse plays a fundamental role in the cycle of the reproduction of social power (2004: 25) Social power abuse, van Dijk (2004) maintains, is not merely coercive (i.e the abuse of physical force) but also persuasive and manipulative The persuasive power of journalists may be based on

knowledge, information, or authority (Schiffrin et al., 2008: 355) The access to

media discourse is itself a power resource, as one can use this access to influence people‘s knowledge and opinions, and may indirectly control their actions For

example, the use of the ontological modality must in the sentence “Major developing countries must commit to reduce their gas emissions.” may express the

power over the major developing countries so as to impose the obligation of

‗committing to reduce their gas emissions‘ on them Another example is the use of agentless passivization in a news article to draw the reader‘s focus on the process, the action, rather than the agent, and to exert influence on the reader in the long run

In the sentence ―The Green Fund will be used to disburse large sums in annual aid for climate defence in poor countries,” the agentless passivization (―will be used‖)

Power relation

According to Fairclough (2015), there exist power relations between social

groupings ―Power relations are always relations of struggle, [ ] the process

whereby social groupings with different interests engage with one another‖ (Fairclough, 2015: 65) He also maintains that, while exercising power through language, one must always struggle with others to defend their position In addition,

it is important to analyze power relations at different levels if ―CDA is to make substantive contribution to critical analysis of existing social reality as a basis for

changing it‖ (ibid.: 28)

In this study, the power relation between the social groupings of the developed and developing countries are analyzed through the language used in the newspapers During such an analysis, the different interests and ideologies about these countries will be revealed and the power relation between them will be deciphered via the language features as well as the discursive practices of the newspapers

Critical and critique

The word critical in CDA does not denote its normal negative meaning, but

implies that CDA:

―aims to systematically explore often opaque relationships of causality and determination between (a) discursive practices, events and texts, and (b) wider social and cultural structures, relations and processes; to investigate how such

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practices, events and texts arise out of and are ideologically shaped by relations

of power and struggles over power; and to explore how the opacity of these relationships between discourse and society is itself a factor securing power and hegemony.‖ (Fairclough, 1995a: 132)

This means decoding the operations of ideology and power relations concealed

by the discursive patterns in the discourse Therefore, critique is making visible the

interconnectedness of textual properties, ideologies, and power relations which are generally not obvious to people who produce and interpret those texts (Fairclough, 1995a: 97)

Adopting the Faircloughean concepts of critical and critique, in this study, the

researcher took a critical stance from the media discourse on climate change, describing and interpreting the textual properties, then explaining how and why these textual features do what they do, uncovering power imbalances (if any) between the developed and developing countries as represented in the discourse, thus unmasking the ideologies conveyed by the two newspapers regarding the developed and developing countries‘ responsibilities for climate change

Ideology

Teun van Dijk (1998b: 3) defines ideology as the ―political or social systems of ideas, values or prescriptions of groups or other collectivities, and have the functions of organizing or legitimating the actions of the group.‖ Group members that share an ideology have a number of general ideas that are the basis of their more specific beliefs, guide their interpretation of events and their social practices

In CDA, ideologies have impacts on discourse and are expressed and conveyed through discourse by means of their own underlying structures Because ―ideology

is frequently identifiable through textual analysis‖ (Jeffries and Walker, 2012: 214) and ―ideology works through disguising its nature, pretending to be what it isn‘t‖ (Fairclough, 2015: 113-4), in order to decode the ideologies about the developed and developing countries‘ responsibilities for climate change from the language in the media discourse under study, we assume that the sample newspaper articles

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carry these ideologies and the detection of the ideologies commences with the textual level of analysis We expect to uncover the ideologies about countries‘ responsibilities for climate change hidden in the texts and to interpret the ideologies via the discursive practices of the two newspaper outlets The contextual background of the global climate debate facilitates the explanation of the hidden ideologies uncovered from the texts In so doing, this study‘s analysis of the climate change discourse elucidates the newspapers‘ ideologies in establishing and sustaining power relations among countries in the global climate debate

Language and society

Language and society are tightly interwoven in that language performs various functions in the society (for instance, showing power, attaining social goals) while society controls our language use by giving us preferences as to what are acceptable and what are not Moreover, language use reflects and even aims to shape the society while changes in the society produce changes in language This study investigates the effects that the societal currents have on the discourse of climate change; and, to a certain extent, vice versa

1.1.2 Major tenets in CDA

Below are the eight tenets in CDA, according to Fairclough and Wodak (1997: 280), along with their relevance to the present thesis

CDA addresses social problems

CDA not only studies language use but also explains the way power imbalances, social inequality and dominance between different social actors are enacted and produced (van Dijk, 2001) In this research, the analysis focuses on the (im)balanced power relations between the two key social groupings of the rich developed and poor developing countries as constructed in the discourse and the way the media make use of the discourse to maintain such power relations

Power relations are discursive

CDA's main concern is how power relations are exerted and negotiated

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through discourse (Fairclough and Wodak, 1997) For instance, those who control the topics and topic change in discourse, such as the editors who decide what news topics to be covered, exert really large influence on the production as well as the reception of the news (van Dijk, 1988) In this study, we analyze the media coverage of ten consecutive COPs as a dynamic entity as well as the three levels of context (namely, textual, discursive, and social) in order to uncover the exercise of power through the media discourse and in order to study the effects of the media in maintaining social imbalance between the developed and developing countries

Discourse constitutes society and culture

CDA focuses on the dialectical relationship between discourse and the society, that is, discourse shapes and is shaped by the specific contexts and by the whole society in which it is used (Breeze, 2013: 30) Every instance of language use contributes to reproducing and transforming society and culture, including power relations (Fairclough and Wodak, 1997) This research examines the power relations between the developed and developing countries, the ideologies about these countries‘ responsibilities for climate change, as manifested in the media discourse and the possible constitutive impacts of such manifestations on the social construction of the global climate debate

Discourse functions ideologically

Ideologies, the ―political or social systems of ideas, values or prescriptions of groups or other collectivities‖ (van Dijk, 1998b: 3), are often produced through discourse To uncover how ideologies are produced, CDA studies how discursive practices constitute unbalanced social powers and unequal relations between groups Those who have power and access can legitimize or delegitimize persons, actions, institutions, etc in the world with their own discourse, so as to reconcile and accommodate the public at large to their subordinate position in the society and finally to accept the powerful people‘s ways of doing CDA identifies the ways in which linguistic features are used to serve ideological ends (Breeze, 2013: 31) As for the present study, attempts are made to analyze the two selected newspapers‘

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ideological stances towards the developed and developing countries‘ responsibilities for climate change as well as the relations among these countries at the global climate debate, and to explain how language was used in conveying such stances

be considered both synchronically and diachronically

The link between the text and society is mediated

Fairclough and Wodak (1997) indicate the complexity of the link between the text and the society, and state that CDA is concerned with making connections between sociocultural processes and structures on the one hand, and textual properties on the other This research studies the mediated link between the English media texts on climate change and the socio-economic contexts that embed and leave traces in the sample texts

Discourse analysis is interpretative and explanatory

Discourse is open to many interpretations, depending on the context, the producer, the time in which the discourse is generated, as well as people‘s thoughts and viewpoints In this study, the climate change discourse is interpreted and explained in relation to the social, economic, political and cultural practices that embed the discourse, from the point of view of a linguistic researcher in the poor developing world

Discourse is a form of social action

CDA implies that it bears the responsibility of raising people‘s awareness of their social practices for emancipatory actions (for example, Wodak and Meyer, 2012; Fairclough, 1995, 2012) Through its critical analysis of discourse on climate

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change, this study expects to uncover the power nexus between the developed and developing countries as reflected in the discourse and to contribute to raising people‘s awareness of the ideologies about the countries‘ responsibilities In the long run, it is hoped that people will become more aware of their accountabilities for and actions against the imbalanced power relations and the adverse effects of climate change

1.1.3 CDA as a Conceptual Framework and Methodology

Being a multidisciplinary approach, CDA does not have a consistent guiding theoretical viewpoint or a single methodological orientation Critical discourse analysts have so far employed a wide variety of theories, namely micro-sociological perspectives (Scollon, 2002), theories on society and power in Michel Foucault‘s legacy (Fairclough, 1995; Jäger and Maier, 2012), socio-cognitive theories (van Dijk, 1998, 2012; Charteris-Black, 2006), as well as individual concepts that are borrowed from larger theoretical traditions What is more, CDA scholars do not work consistently from the area of theory to the field of discourse and then back to theory Their data collection and analytical procedure is permanently oscillatory What brings CDA‘s different orientations together is a shared aim and strategy The aim is to expose the relationship between discourse and power by analyzing the representation of power in relevant discursive instances and its contribution to long-term construction of discursive practices The strategy is ―a principled and transparent shunting back and forth between the micro-analysis of texts using varied tools of linguistic, semiotic, and literary analysis and the macro-analysis of social formations, institutions, and power relations that these texts index and construct‖ (Luke, 2002: 100)

Within the current study, four prominent approaches to CDA will be reviewed below, as they have significantly contributed to the development of CDA so far The review of the CDA approaches will end with the one by which this thesis is predominantly informed

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The Socio-Cognitive Approach

Among the significantly contributing scholars to CDA in general, the Cognitive Approach in particular, Teun van Dijk has been cited tremendously in various pieces of research Van Dijk‘s approach to CDA is most concerned with the

Socio-―socio-cognitive interface of discourse, that is, the relation between the mind, discursive interaction and society‖ (2012: 65) Thus, he emphasizes that ―the study

of discourse triangulates between society/culture/situation, cognition, and

discourse/language‖ (ibid.:14) His approach is conducted in three dimensions: (i)

the social analysis examining the overall societal context, (ii) the cognitive analysis, and (iii) the discourse analysis investigating text‘s syntax, lexicon, local semantics, topics, schematic structures, etc (van Dijk, 1995: 30)

Of particular relevance to this dissertation are van Dijk‘s notion of actors and his ideological square framework He maintains that social actors may hold various

identities simultaneously, and CDA examines the locally relevant or more prominent ones as well as their influence on or by discourse (van Dijk, 2012: 82)

As described in his ideological square framework (van Dijk, 1998: 25), when there

is a conflict between interests of different social actors, the typical content of group ideologies tends to be polarized At one extreme is a positive self or in-group representation emphasizing the good properties/actions of the in-group members and mitigating their bad properties/actions At the other end is a negative representation of others or out-group members emphasizing their bad properties/actions and mitigating their good properties/actions This notion of social actors informs the classification of the polarized countries to be further analyzed, and the ideological framework informs the interpretation of the polarized countries‘ positions in this thesis

Although van Dijk‘s approach focuses more on the variable cultural and social resources, when it is compared to Fairclough‘s (1995) approach, it is not so oriented toward lexico-syntactic features of texts This is one of the reasons why Fairclough‘s approach is more appropriate for the purpose of this study

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The Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA)

Ruth Wodak is the main figure associated with this approach The Historical approach combines theoretical discourse studies with the analysis of large data and ethnographic fieldwork Wodak claims that the approach is three-dimensional: (i) the specific content or topics of a specific discourse, (ii) the discursive strategies, and (iii) linguistic means and the specific, context-dependent linguistic realizations (Wodak and Meyer, 2012: 93) The DHA proponents employ such discursive strategies as referential, nomination, predication, argumentation, perspectivization, intensification and mitigation This approach emphasizes the historical and socio-political context, which is also integrated into the interpretation stage Therefore, DHA holds the pros that it can minimize the risk of biases in the findings Furthermore, the historical analysis enables the researcher to pay attention to ―the diachronic reconstruction and explanation of

Discourse-discursive change‖ (ibid.: 120)

Despite the above-mentioned advantages of the DHA, it is not used in this thesis for two main reasons First, since it has no clear procedure for the analyzing and interpreting of historical context (Wodak and Meyer, 2012: 30), the approach might not be able to serve the purpose of analyzing the newspaper coverage of the global climate conferences in a row of ten consecutive years Second, as already stated by Wodak and Meyer (2012: 96), a thorough discourse-historical analysis following an eight-stage programme (as they propose) might require a rather large enough amount of time, money, and personnel, conducting a DHA for the purpose

of this thesis might be exhausting

The Socio-Semantic Representation Model

Theo van Leeuwen (1996) introduces a sociosemantic inventory consisting of twelve morpho-syntactic categories by which social actors are represented in discourse With van Leeuwen‘s sociosemantic framework, the usage of power as socially assigned to different social actors and actions can be factored into the analysis The process types and text transitivity are investigated in conjunction with

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the social actors and actions to explain how messages are codified within discourse for the purpose of creating ideological presuppositions Though the whole inventory elaborated by van Leeuwen is very complex, with some overlapping categories, this

is by far one of the most detailed approaches for the purpose of uncovering social actor representation in discourse This model seems to support the study of power relations between social actors more than the study of ideologies While the present study is more interested in ideologies, one of van Leeuwen‘s category is of good use

in this current study, particularly in the interpretation and explanation of how the developed and the developing countries are represented in the discourse That is, the category of activization/passivization, in which van Leeuwen follows Halliday‘s (1985) systemic functional approach and takes interest in the roles that are allocated

to the actors, whether they are activized or passivized in the discourse According to van Leeuwen (1996: 43-44), activization occurs when social actors are represented

―as the active and dynamic forces in an activity.‖ For instance, children are activized in ‗The children often play football outside.‘ Passivization occurs when the social actors are shown as ‗undergoing‘ the activity For instance, children are passivized in ‗The children are allowed to play football in the yard during the day.‘

or in ‗The school allows the children to play football in the yard during the day.‘ Similarly, poor countries are passivized in ―They insisted on more help given to poor countries.‖ or in ―They raised questions about the annual aid for climate defence in poor countries.‖ One type of van Leeuwen‘s passivization uses nominalizations and process nouns to exclude social actors For example, in ―The level of support for stopping immigration altogether was at a postwar high.” (van

Leeuwen, 1996: 40), the nominalizations of ‗support,‘ ‗stopping,‘ and ‗immigration‘ hide the social actors, who could have been included through postmodifying phrases

with ‗by,‘ ‗of,‘ ‗from,‘ etc In van Leeuwen‘s (ibid.) viewpoint, such ways of

passivizing, or excluding, the agents from the text underpins certain intentions

The Dialectical-Relational Approach

In Fairclough‘s point of view, discourse is a form of social practice, and there is

a dialectical relationship between discourse and society Discourse reflects and is

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reflected by society (Fairclough, 1992: 17) His Dialectical-Relational Approach proposes that a critical analysis of discourse be in three dimensions, namely textual, discursive and social

Norman Fairclough is considered the most influential founder of CDA, especially of the Dialectial-Relational Approach Combining a Marxist theory of

discourse, Foucault‘s (1972) concept of orders of discourse, Gramsci‘s (1971) concept of hegemony with linguistic methods of text analysis, Fairclough advocates

that CDA should pursue emancipatory objectives to solve social conflicts via detecting their linguistic manifestations in discourses (Fairclough 1989, 1992, 1995b, 1995c) His Dialectical-Relational approach is different from the three approaches mentioned above in its emphasis on the link between the textual properties and the social dimension of discourse

First, in textual (or micro-level) analysis, the Faircloughean CDA draws upon the systemic functional linguistics (Halliday, 1985) to closely analyze the linguistic features of discourse that are deemed to be politically – or culturally - influential to

a society Fairclough (1995: 104) maintains that there are two major aspects of texts

to consider during analysis The first concerns the representation of social actors, and the analysis of clauses representing actions, processes and events This analysis

is applied to text‘s lexico-grammatical and semantic properties (Fairclough, 1995)

―A close analysis of texts in terms of such features can contribute to our understanding of power relations and ideological processes in discourse‖ (Fairclough, 2015: 128) The second aspect concerns the organization of these single clauses into a coherently structured whole, whereby the analysis is on

cohesion and organization above the sentence level (ibid.: 57) Put simply, choices

and patterns in vocabulary (e.g., wording, metaphors), grammar (e.g modality), semantics, and cohesion (e.g conjunction) should be systematically analyzed The utilization of passive verb forms in news reports, for example, can have the effect of obscuring the agent of political processes However, very often, Fairclough‘s set of textual features is used in analyzing one single text or quite a few texts, and ―the