The hidden power of grammar: a mixed-methods study of media discourses on climate change protests and their effects on audience attitude.

The proposed research will provide insight into the power of the news media to covertly shape public attitudes towards pressing global issues, including the climate crisis as well as activism as a social practice.

The climate crisis can be considered one of the biggest issues facing humanity today. Amidst rising climate urgency from scientific bodies, since 2018 the UK has seen a wave of high-profile climate change protests which have gained public and political attention. Now, recent changes to government policy have introduced stricter laws governing UK citizens' right to protest. In light of this, the present research aims to explore how climate protests have been represented in the UK press from 2018 to 2022. Contributing to a growing body of research which combines corpus assisted CDA (critical discourse analysis) and experimental methods (Fuoli & Hart, 2018; Hart, 2018), the proposed research will take a mixed-methods approach in order to investigate whether fine-grained grammatical choices made by the UK press in reporting Climate Change protests can meaningfully influence audience attitudes.

The research will begin with a CDA investigation into how the UK press has used subtle grammatical framing strategies to encourage certain interpretations of climate protest events from 2018-2022. Then, through experimental methods the study will verify the claims put forward by this analysis by investigating the effects of these identified grammatical framing strategies on audience evaluations.