Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people(s) in Australian print news: A corpus-based critical discourse analysis

Abstract

This thesis investigates the representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people(s) in mainstream Australian newspapers. It combines approaches from corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis to examine factors such as terms of reference, prominent themes and salient discourses employed in this coverage. The data consists of a purpose-built corpus of articles containing mention of Aboriginal people(s) or issues published in the 12 major metropolitan dailies within a 3-month period in mid 2019. The analysis confirmed a number of previous findings, as well as identifying two previously unidentified discourses—those of economic success and non-agential cooperation—and the linguistic resources used to construct them. One particularly valuable contribution is the finding that the agency of Aboriginal participants in cooperative events is often undermined using prepositions, a part of speech regularly overlooked in both corpus linguistic and critical discourse analytic studies.