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Article published In:
Language, Politics and Media: The Hong Kong Protests
Edited by Guofeng Wang and Ming Liu
[Journal of Language and Politics 21:1] 2022
► pp. 37–59

The politics of fear in Hong Kong protest representations

A corpus-assisted discourse study

ORCID logo | The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
| Sun Yat-sen University
This study gives a corpus-assisted discourse study of the representations of 2019 Hong Kong protests in the New York Times. With the corpus-analytic tools Wmatrix and Wordsmith, it examines both the dominant patterns in its representations and the specific strategies used. The findings suggest that while NYT still draws on the traditional patterns in its representations of Hong Kong protests, it deviates from the protest paradigm in its representations of concerned parties. Meanwhile, emotion discourse has emerged as a distinct strategy in its representations. This is most revealing in the emotion of fear, and a close analysis of its use in its context has revealed its role in the construction of concerned parties and the distrust of Hong Kong people towards the Chinese government.
Keywords: protests, Hong Kong, corpus-assisted discourse study, emotion, fear
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Emotion in news discourse and the politics of fear
  • 3.Corpus-assisted discourse studies
  • 4.Methodology
    • 4.1Data
    • 4.2Analytic methods
  • 5.Findings
    • 5.1General analysis of key SMCs
    • 5.2Analysis of key emotion SMCs
    • 5.3Analysis of the lemma fear*
  • 6.Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 5 October 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.21019.liu
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