"Imagine, if you will\u2026": Reader Positioning on Climate Change in US Op-Ed Articles

The paper examines some of the rhetorical strategies of British and American press editorials and opinion articles about one crucial environmental issue, i.e. climate change. In particular, we shall be interested in exploring how the \u201cintersubjective\u201d stance (White 2003, Martin and White 2005) is constructed from a cross-cultural perspective and how the different newspapers act to align/disalign their readership with reference to the topic at issue. The paper builds on a personal ongoing research project carried out over the last two years in order to investigate how the issue of climate change is represented across a variety of newspaper genres (Bevitori 2010). For the purpose of the study, a corpus of British and American quality press coverage of climate change (and related phenomena) over a well-defined span of time in 2007 was compiled, consisting of about 4,090 complete articles and amounting to 3,395,000 running words. The year 2007 coincided with a number of key events in the issue of climate change, such as the release of the Fourth Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change, the publication at the end of the previous year of The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change and the UN Climate Change Conference held in Bali on closing of the year. These events may be said to reflect Chilton\u2019s notion of \u201ccritical discourse moments\u201d (cited in Gamson and Modigliani 1989:11). The analytical framework adopted will combine the theoretical work on appraisal, developed within the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics, with the methodologies of corpus-assisted discourse analysis (see, inter alia, Partington 2003, Miller 2006, Baker 2006, Morley and Bayley eds 2009)