Die Entwicklung einer sektoralen Argumentationstheorie am Beispiel des Diskurses über den Klimawandel

Today climate change is an important topic, in which not exclusively natural sciences are engaged anymore. Humanities can contribute important findings to it, particularly such about the communicative dimension of the problem. However, until now the examination of argumentation structures has been disregarded while exploring the discourse about climate change. My thesis reacts to this deficit and provides an insight into an argument analysis of media coverage of climate change in German-speaking media in Switzerland. Such an approach to discursive argumentation structures is confronted with different scientific challenges, as medial elements often contain enthymemic conclusions, which are profoundly context-sensitive and implicit. Special approaches are needed to describe the argumentation structures within the discourse appropriately and to evaluate them normatively. Reisigl (2014) advocates a sectoral argumentation analysis as an access point to such a problem. The thesis aims to establish a sectoral argumentation theory on the basis of empiric analysis of a corpus of Swiss media texts. It resorts to corpus linguistic and corpus pragmatic methods (Felder/Müller/Vogel 2012). The corpus will contain highly represented print media and television formats of German-speaking Switzerland. The results of the empiric analysis are then applied to the discourse about climate change. Comprehensive findings about the argumentation – as particular, discourse specific topoi – in the media coverage about climate change in German-speaking media in Switzerland can be gained through such an analytical approach which could be important for praxis as well. The thesis is of theoretical relevance, as the establishment of a sectoral argumentation theory can be of importance for different strains of discourse analysis.