Tag Archives: news discourse

Welcoming the new members of the Climate Change team

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We are delighted to announce that Dr. Marcus Müller from the University of Heidelberg (Germany) and Dr. Maria Cristina Caimotto from the University of Torino (Italy) have kindly agreed to join CASS Changing Climate project, led by Professor John Urry.

They both will have a lot to contribute to the project. Their experience and language skills will allow us to broaden the project’s scope and also examine the discourses around climate change issues in German and Italian newspapers.

Dr. Marcus Müller is a senior lecturer in German linguistics at the Department of German in the University of Heidelberg, Germany. He is also an associate member of the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies (HCTS) and a teaching fellow of the Heidelberg Graduate School for Humanities and Social Sciences (HGGS). He has also been a visiting lecturer at the universities of Paderborn and Düsseldorf as well as at the universities of Tashkent, Budapest and Beijing. Dr. Marcus Müller is the founder and spokesman for the German-Chinese graduate network “Sprachkulturen – Fachkulturen” and the “Language and Knowledge” Graduate Platform (http://en.sprache-und-wissen.de/). His research interests include corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, grammatical variation, language and social roles, language and art. You can find more about him at http://www.gs.uni-heidelberg.de/sprache02/mitarbeiter/mueller/index.html

Dr. Maria Cristina Caimotto is research fellow in English Language and Translation at the Department of Culture, Politics and Society of the University of Torino. She is also a member of the Environmental Humanities International Research Group. Her research interests include translation studies, political discourse and environmental discourse. In her work, the contrastive analysis of texts in different languages (translated or comparable) is employed as a tool for critical discourse analysis.

Update on Changing Climates

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The Changing Climates project is a corpus-based investigation of discourses around climate change. It aims to examine how climate change has been framed in the media coverage across Britain and Brazil in the past decade. Here, we look at two different scenarios. Recent surveys have shown that climate change is currently considered a high priority concern within Brazil, with the country showing higher degree of concern than almost anywhere else. By contrast, climate change scepticism is increasingly prominent in the British public sphere.

We are pleased to announce that we have just finished collecting the data. The Brazilian corpus contains about 8 million words, comprising texts from 12 newspapers. The British corpus is much larger. It has nearly 80 million words and includes texts published by all major British broadsheet and tabloid papers.