Textual and Polyphonic Structures in Climate Change and COVID-19 Discourses: Macro- and Micro-Linguistic Analysis

Abstract

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) aims to present scientific material to policymakers and a huge audience with different educational backgrounds so that they may respond to the growing man-induced Climate Change (CC). IPCC releases Assessment Reports, Summaries for Policymakers (SPM) and scientific assessments to identify the latest knowledge about CC. World Health Organization (WHO) has declared COVID-19 to be an international pandemic. WHO, accordingly, produces Situation Reports (SRs) about the COVID-19 epidemiological data. Being scientific documents about major two global issues, SPM and SRs are linguistically investigated. To render a comprehensive analysis of SPM and SRs discourses, macro- and micro-features of texts are considered. The analytical framework is bidimensional. Macro-textual features are inspired by the contributions of Van Dijk (1977, 1980); Van Dijk and Kintsch (1983); Kintsch and Van Dijk (1987) and Hamburger (1981). The analytical micro-level framework is founded on ScaPoLine polyphonists’ contributions: Nølke, Fløttum and Norén (2004). Findings illustrate SPM-SR differences at the macro- and micro-level. The study detects newly-used polyphonic items. It is concluded that CC and COVID-19 scientific discourses are polyphony-dependent, but multi-voicedness is a dominant feature in CC discourse.