A Corpus-driven Study of the Ecological Discourse Analysis of Energy Narrative in News: The New York Times as Example

Abstract

The reductions in economic activities and mobility during the COVID-19 pandemic heavily challenged the global energy sector, due to which an energy crisis began to unfold in 2021. Under this social background, the linguistics community pay more and more attention to energy narrative in discourse. Based on Stibbe's definition and Fairclough's three-dimensional model, this study combined quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze the ecological discourses of the New York Times reported during the energy crisis. This study found that the selected news discourses contain ecologically destructive elements and use the "Erasure of causality" strategy more frequently. Ecological discourse analysis of news discourse is conducive to deconstructing ecological destructive discourse and helping the public to further distinguish misleading and deceptive energy reports.