The Meanings of RESPONSIBILITY in the British and American Press on Climate Change: a Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis Perspective

More than ten years after Bell’s characterization of climate change as a “high profile issue of the global environment” (1994:33), his words may sound or, better, resound even more appropriate today. However, if at the time of Bell’s publication, climate change covered issues such as the hole in the ozone layer, acid rain and global warming (see also Hayer 1994, Hayer and Versteeg 2005, Carvahlo and Burgess 2005), the debate is partly being shifted into new territories (Bevitori 2010). The paper aims at investigating the semantic area/s of RESPONSIBILITY, which turned out of some interest for my recent study of a corpus of British and American press coverage of climate change, and related phenomena, over a well-defined span of time in 2007 (Climate Change Corpus). The year 2007, in fact, coincided with some key events, such as the release of the Fourth Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change, the publication of The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, which was commissioned by the British government and the UN Climate Change Conference held in Bali on closing of the year. Drawing on Gerbig (1997), the semantics of RESPONSIBILITY shall be discussed with reference to our specialized domain of analysis. An examination of the ways in which the lemma is used reveals partially overlapping but distinct senses of the term which, in turn, may lead to uncover traces of the diverging or concurring ideological positionings of the news outlets under investigation. In particular, the paper aims at exploring what meanings of RESPONSIBILITY in the Climate Change discussions are construed by the different newspapers, as well as in what ways “responsibility/ies” are mediated to their readership. The methodological framework will make use of the tools of corpus linguistics with a discourse analytical perspective grounded on Systemic Functional Linguistics, whose combination has been proved to be a productive terrain of analysis in previous research on specialised corpora (Morley and Bayley eds. 2009)