Paper 026: Contrasting Narratives: The Greek Financial Crisis in Newspaper Editorials

LINGLE, Will (University of Aizu, Japan)

Keywords: Critical Discourse Analysis, Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies, News Discourse

Abstract

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) provides approaches to explicitly political analyses of texts in their social contexts, though CDA has attracted criticism for overinterpretation of results from analyses of small numbers of texts (Widdowson, 2004). Central to the critical interest in mass media representations is the claim that media texts exert ideological effects on readers in cumulative fashion through repetition of similar characterizations of events and social actors. Corpora offer means of investigating CDA claims, which may be combined in an approach known broadly as corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) (Baker, 2006; Partington, 2003). This study began with a Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) transitivity analysis (Halliday and Matthiessen 2014) of two US newspaper editorials on the Greek financial crisis, which revealed differences in how the two texts expressed sympathy for key social actors and attributed blame for the crisis. To test whether the portrayals in these two texts represented consistent patterns in the editorial pages, corpora of over half a million words of editorial texts from each paper from 2013-2015 were compiled. Texts focusing on the Greek crisis were retrieved from these using AntConc (Anthony 2011) to produce smaller specialized corpora. Using these, the transitivity analysis was scaled up to focus on all clauses representing one of the three main groups of social actors in the crisis. In each corpus, dominant patterns of representation that could be called ‘narratives’ or schema emerged which revealed that the two newspapers expressed sympathy and attributed blame for the crisis in ways consistent with the two sample texts. The New York Times expressed sympathy for the Greek people and blamed the EU creditors, while the Washington Post blamed the Greek government and praised the EU creditors. Corpora proved valuable informants into broader patterns of discourse, and as a means of reducing researcher bias.

Anthony, L. (2011). AntConc (Version 3.2.2.1). [Computer software]. Tokyo, Japan: Waseda University. Available at: https://www.laurenceanthony.net/software
Baker, P. (2006). Using corpora in discourse analysis. Bloomsbury.
Halliday, M. and Matthiessen, C. (2014) Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar (4th ed.). London: Routledge.
Partington, A. (2003). The linguistics of political argument: The spin-doctor and the wolf-pack at the White House. Routledge.
Widdowson, H. G. (2004). Text, context, pretext: Critical issues in critical discourse analysis. Blackwell.

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