Framing responsibilities for climate change in Chinese and American newspapers : a corpus-assisted discourse study

Abstract

This study conducts a corpus-assisted discourse study of framing responsibilities for climate change in China Daily (CD) and The New York Times (NYT). Based on the distinction between causal and treatment responsibilities, it focuses on the framing of human and non-human causal responsibilities as well as developed and developing countries’ causal and treatment responsibilities for climate change in the two newspapers. The findings suggest that CD tends to show consensus on the human causes of climate change while NYT is inclined to problematize human causes for climate change. While both newspapers favor treatment over causal responsibilities, CD prefers to underline developed countries’ historical causal responsibilities for climate change and urges developed countries to take more treatment responsibilities for climate change, whereas NYT prefers to underscore developing countries’ current causal responsibilities for climate change and their shared treatment responsibilities for climate change.