Framing the conceptualization of obesity in online chinese and british quality newspapers: A corpus-assisted study

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to discuss how the problem of obesity is re-presented by two online newspapers of conservative leaning: the British paper The Daily Telegraph and the Chinese China Daily. The two web-based press corpora, ca. 190,000 words in size, used in the study were compiled using the WebBootCat method. The methodology used to analyse the data illustrated the Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS); in particular, the following corpus-driven methods and tools were involved: frequency lists, logDi3ce and MI statistics, automatic synonyms and keywords. The study also employed qualitative analysis in line with the Framing Theory. The analysis has shown substantial differences in the way the problem of obesity is presented by the two online newspapers. The conceptualization and framing of obesity in the Chinese corpus could be classified as representing the causality discourse, whilst the British corpus could be seen as representing the treatment discourse.