“Dieselgate is Made in Germany” – Framing Volkswagen Emissions Scandal in the German Economy
“Dieselgate is Made in Germany” – Framing Volkswagen Emissions Scandal in the German Economy

Summary/Abstract: This paper presents and discusses the findings of a cross-linguistic corpus-assisted analysis (Partington/ Duguid/Taylor 2013, Taylor 2014) of the Volkswagen Emissions Scandal Discourse in German and Italian news. It was conducted to answer the following research questions: − which framings are recurrently used to represent the Emission Scandal as an economic issue? − how do these language patterns influence its representation as a primarily environmental issue? The analysis was conducted by applying Frame Theory (Goffman 1974, Tannen 1993, Lakoff/Wehling 2012), Metaphor Theory (Lakoff/Johnson 20032, Larson 2011) and Erasure Theory (Van Leeuwen 2008, Stibbe 2015) within the more general framework of Ecological Linguistics (Fill/Penz 2018) – “an ecolinguistic approach to the analysis of […] ‘discourses’, ‘lexicogrammatical patterns’, ‘sense-making resources’” (Steffensen/Fill 2014). The data sets include news articles (totally 230) published from 20th September to 20th October 2015 on the websites of “Die Zeit” (115 articles) and “La Repubblica” (115 articles), and containing at least one of the following keywords of the scandal in the respective language: Abgasskandal or Abgas-Skandal, Abgasaffare or Abgas-affare, VW-Skandal, VW-Affare, Diesel-Skandal; scandalo Volkswagen, scandalo emissioni, scandalo delle emissioni, caso Volkswagen. The quantitative-qualitative analysis of collocations (Baker 2006) and concordances suggests that the framing Dieselgate damages the German economy emerges in discourse, thus backgrounding (Stibbe 2015) the environmental and ecological issues related to the Volkswagen Emissions Scandal (Dieselgate damages Environment and human health).

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