Reporting Trends in Sustainability and Climate Change Discourse : A corpus study about reporting verbs in global news

Abstract: In news reports, journalists often make references to what spokespersons from public organizations have announced. While doing so, reporting verbs are not an uncommon occurrence (Li, Zhao & Lou, 2023: 2). This study, analyzes reporting verbs that occur with either Greenpeace and WWF, also referred to as green organizations, or with British Petroleum and Exxon, also referred to as oil companies. Over the years, the trends of reporting verb utilization have changed, turning more colloquial than before (Mair 1998: 153). A strong indicator of this is the increase of the verb say that is also one of the most common reporting verbs in this study. It should be noted that out of 22 266 verb occurrences, the verb say peaked at 13808 (62,01 percent). The oil companies represented 47.18 percent of all the instances and the green organizations peaked at 52.82 percent. Another noteworthy finding is the difference in reporting verb usage, where urgency verbs such as call and warn were more frequently occurring with the green organizations. The RVs that occurred with oil companies, on the other hand, were more neutral discourse verbs such as report, announce and say.