Breach of pacta sunt servanda: A corpus-assisted analysis of newspaper discourse on the AUKUS agreement

Abstract

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.