Agency and responsibility in environmental reporting in the Chinese press: a corpus-based diachronic analysis

Abstract This article presents the findings of a corpus-based diachronic discourse study of the representations of the causes of and solutions to China’s air pollution in the official Chinese English-language China Daily (2008–2018) with a view to exploring agency for both causal responsibility and treatment responsibility. The findings reveal that greater prominence is given to treatment responsibility than to causal responsibility. Causal responsibility is mainly attributed to no agents or to physical agents, while treatment responsibility is chiefly assigned to social agents. In addition, a transitivity analysis shows that causer agents are primarily represented by Actors in material processes and Tokens in relational processes, whereas solver agents are principally represented by Actors in material processes, Tokens and Carriers in relational processes, Sensers in mental processes, and Sayers in verbal processes. It is argued that these linguistic features are linked to socio-political factors within which the press operates.