A Corpus-based Discourse Analysis On Obesity

Obesity has become and will continue to be a global epidemic in the following years,making it become a popular topic in domestic and foreign researches.However,few domestic scholars investigate the topic of obesity from the perspective of discourse analysis.Based on Fairclough’s Three-dimensional Analysis Framework and Wodak’s Discourse-historical Approach,this study explores the discursive construction on obesity by comparing the reports from Xinmin Evening News and The Times from 1998 to 2020.Besides,this study intends to explore how Xinmin Evening News and The Times construct on obesity,together with their similarities and differences,revealing the factors that affect the construction on obesity discourse.Based on the keyword analysis,this study found that Xinmin Evening News and The Times pay close attention to the issues of childhood obesity and female obesity.In addition,both of them emphasize the impact of parental education on the formation children’s lifestyles and advocating scientific weight loss.Xinmin Evening News attributes the obesity problem to individual choice and give priority to the prevention of obesity.While The Times believes that the lack of government supervision and the provision of junk food by food companies should be blame for obesity issues.Therefore,this study summarized “boycotting junk food discourse”,“parenting discourse” and “developing healthy lifestyles discourse” in terms of obesity.From the perspective of nomination strategy and predication strategy,this study further analyzed the discursive construction on obesity in Chinese and British leading newspapers.Xinmin Evening News constructs obesity as “a factor that increases the risk of chronic diseases” and “an infectious disease”.While The Times describes obesity as “a public health problem” and “a burden for the allocation of social resources”.By means of Discourse-historical Approach,it is found that the discourse constructions on obesity in Xinmin Evening News and The Times are mainly influenced by factors such as the newspaper systems,mainstream values,and family values.Adopting the perspective of discourse analysis and utilizing corpus techniques for text analysis,this study investigates the discourse construction on obesity in Xinmin Evening News and The Times,with the aim of expanding the research perspective of obesity discourse and raising the public’s awareness to this issue.