A Contrastive Study of Discoursal Emotions of the News on Global Warming Between China’s and American Newspapers

Recently, there has been an emotional turn in news research, but not many scholars conducted contrastive studies of discoursal emotions of the news on climate change between China’s and American media, and not many studies presented the differences in emotions toward the issues of climate change between the two countries’ newspapers. In view of these situations, this study aimed to analyze the detailed differences in discoursal emotions in news on global warming between China’s and American newspapers, as well as the underlying causes for these differences. To achieve this goal, the study constructed the Socio-emotional Theory and employed a combination of corpus approaches, semantic annotation, frequency contrast analysis, and discourse analysis. The results show that, according to contrast of usage frequency, China’s and American newspapers prominently employ 21 and 7 emotional words, respectively. China’s newspapers tend to use these 21 emotional words to highlight the negative impact of global warming and the urgency of its governance, and indicate that some countries might not attach enough importance to and take no action against global warming; American newspapers are inclined to exploit these 7 emotional words to prominently present antithetical views on global warming governance and highlight the unfavorable impact of global warming. Meanwhile, the former utilize the emotional concept of misery prominently, while the latter relatively highlight the emotional concepts of disgust, happiness, and worry. The antitheses between stances of media, the collectivism and the individualism, the harmony thought and the prioritization of interests, and the community with a shared future for mankind and the America first between China and the United States might be the causes for the differences in the above discoursal emotional characteristics. This study could expand theoretical boundaries of discourse analysis, and provide important enlightenment for building and strengthening the international alliances to address global warming.