Representation of the US Government in US Winter Storm Discourse: A Corpus-Based Ecocritical Analysis
Keywords:
Winter storm, government, representation, positive, negative, environmentAbstract
This study analyses the portrayal of the United States government in the US Winter Storm discourse produced about the winter storm that hit US in 2022. The study particularly focuses on how the diverse actions of the government and its institutions are represented through salience and erasure and how are the particular representations of the government beneficial, destructive, or otherwise for the ecology and the ecological systems. The study employs corpus linguistic approach to analyse the data. The data were collected from the news stories on the 2022 US winter storm. The news stories were combined into a corpus which was named as Corpus of US Winter storm Discourse. Using the corpus linguistics tool AntConc, a list of the keywords was generated. 3 keywords were selected out of the keyword list and their concordance lines were investigated in detail. Stibbe (2021) stories framework was used as the theoretical framework of the study. The study found that the news channels highlight the positive actions of the government, such as public advisories, resource mobilization, and emergency declarations, to position the government as a proactive crisis protector and manager. The news channels emphasise these actions by repeatedly referring to government actors, such as departments, officials, minister, and governor etc., enhancing their centrality and visibility in the discourse. On the contrary, the study also found that the failures and negligence of the government, such as inadequate preparedness and late emergency reactions,are totally erased from the discourse. These failures are linguistically minimized and represented as the general disaster consequences. Such a representation of the government strengthens a highly environmentally destructive narrative in which the government is protected from responsibility and accountability. It minimises the chances of improvement on the part of the government as the government is not criticised in the news discourse, which generally leads to thoughts on improvement. The study calls for the search for new stories and discourses that may promote environmentally beneficial thinking patterns and actions by the government and the general public.
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