Breach of pacta sunt servanda: A corpus-assisted analysis of newspaper discourse on the AUKUS agreement
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Elsevier
Date
2024-11Referencia bibliográfica
Published version: R. Trnavac and E.H. Tenorio. Breach of pacta sunt servanda: A corpus-assisted analysis of newspaper discourse on the AUKUS agreement. Applied Corpus Linguistics 4 (2024) 100108. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acorp.2024.100108
Sponsorship
National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE University); Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation PID2021-125788OB-I00Abstract
The AUKUS agreement,1 a strategic pact between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, primarily aimed to facilitate Australia’s acquisition of eight nuclear-powered submarines from the US and Britain.
This agreement led to the abrupt termination of a previous contract with France’s state-owned Naval Group. This
article examines the language used in media coverage of the AUKUS agreement in newspapers from various
Anglophone and Asian countries. Employing a combination of Sentiment Analysis (Crossley et al., 2017) and
Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (Partington, 2013; Gillings et al., 2023), we focus on identifying key linguistic
patterns, themes, and the sentiment embedded in the discourse. Our findings indicate a general positive
assessment of AUKUS in the Anglophone media, contrasted with negative portrayals in Chinese publications.
Moreover, the analysis of linguistic components such as adjectives, nouns, and verbs reveals underlying complexities and conflicting viewpoints within the Anglophone discourse itself. By applying Corpus-Assisted
Discourse Studies, we uncover the contextual and linguistic factors that shape these diverse perspectives.