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Description
The research presented here analyses how online news reader commenters verbally depict climate change effects concerning wildlife, animal-life and plant-life, doing so diachronically over a fifteen year period until the present day. More specifically, the approach adopted is a broadly corpus-assisted discourse studies one (Partington et al., 2013), where approximately 7,000 instances of biodiversity effects (e.g. habitat loss, species extinction, coral reef bleaching, destruction of wetland) are returned in a 75 million word corpus of newsreader comments on all the Guardian Online climate change articles (2009-2023). These biodiversity effects are determined as one prominent group in an initial thematic analysis of definitions of climate change causes and effects according to various stakeholders in the climate change debate (e.g. Greenpeace, n.d.). The analysis of discursive representation is conducted according to Hallidayan semanticised transitivity (e.g. Matthiessen, 1995: 187-380). Thus, the focus of the analysis of the approximately 7,000 instances of biodiversity effects is on: (i) which types of process biodiversity effects are represented as being involved in (i.e. material, mental, verbal, relational and their various sub-types); (ii) which participant roles biodiversity effects are constructed in; (iii) which other recurrent referents are involved as which participants roles together with biodiversity effects; and (iv) what changes and/or consistencies are seen across time in terms of (i)-(iii).
Greenpeace. (n.d.). ‘What are the effects of climate change?’. https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/challenges/climate-change/effects-climate-change/
Matthiessen, C.M.I.M. (1995). Lexicogrammatical Cartography: English Systems. Tokyo: International Language Science Publishers.
Partington, A., Duguid, A., & Taylor, C. (2013). Patterns and Meanings in Discourse: Theory and Practice in Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
