The Immersion Stage in Summary
Feature 1: Naming of Events
Defi nition and Analysis Method
Analysing the feature “naming of events” was relatively straightforward.
My concern with this linguistic feature was to identify and discuss the diff erent ways in which writers refer to the events of the BP Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill. Th e task was to identify the expressions within the texts that refer to these events. In some cases these were single nouns, and in other cases a noun phrase including determiners, adjectives and prepositional phrases. Th is raised the question of how much of an expression to count as a naming choice. My procedure was to count the whole noun group without the determiner , that is, the noun head and any accompanying adjectives and adverbials. Th e following is an example of a naming choice:
British energy giant BP said Tuesday that fi rst-quarter profi ts rocketed on higher oil prices but admitted that the news was overshadowed by last
week’s tragic accident at a rig in the Gulf of Mexico . (Agence France Presse, 27.4.2010, my emphasis)
Here I counted the noun head “accident”, the adjective “tragic” and prep- ositional phrases of time or place “last week” and “in the Gulf of Mexico”.
I carried out an analysis of the length of naming phrases by calculating the average number of words in the naming expressions within each data set. Once I had a set of naming choices for each year, I was further able to analyse them by whether they were generally neutral or generally nega- tive in tone. In the fi rst example above, while I would consider the term
“accident” to be a neutral choice on its own, the presence of the adjective
“tragic” would suggest a negative shading.
Findings from the BP Data
Using this defi nition and analysis approach, the data were analysed in 20 texts from each year. Th e results across the three years—summarised in Table 8.1 —showed a number of signifi cant features.
Th e number of times the events are named at all drops from 89 in 20 texts in 2010 to 41 in 20 texts in 2012. By 2012, the BP story has become part of a bigger picture, and is often mentioned only once per news item. Th e three most mentioned descriptors (excluding “spill”) are consistently “oil spill”,
“disaster” and “explosion”. In 2010, these terms accounted for 38 of the 89 terms used (43 %). By 2012, they accounted for 29 of the 41 terms used (71 %), suggesting an ever closer alignment within the media concerning how the events should be named. Th e average length of the nominal group
Table 8.1 Analysis of naming terms for the BP Deepwater Horizon events
2010 2011 2012
Number of naming terms (per 000 words) %
Number of naming terms
(per 000
words) %
Number of naming terms (per 000 words) % Neutral 73 (8.0) 82 39 (5.6) 60 23 (3.2) 56 Negative 16 (1.8) 18 26 (3.7) 40 18 (2.5) 44 Total 89 (9.8) 100 65 (9.3) 100 41 (5.8) 100
increased from 2.2 words in 2010 to 3.2 words in 2012, as the noun head is accompanied by a greater number of adjectives and adverbials. Th is type of density in noun groups is typical of journalistic prose where a lengthy noun group concentrates a considerable amount of information in a small space. What is important about these dense nominal groups is that they are selective : they organise and categorise the events in a particular way, which includes certain features or evaluations and excludes others.
Typical of 2010 are names such as:
“tragic incident”
“oil rig spill”
“potential environmental disaster”
By 2012, naming choices have become longer and more descriptive:
“the BP Deepwater Horizon nightmare in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010”
“the US Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster in 2010”
“the 2010 BP Macondo rig disaster”
“the BP Deepwater Horizon oil disaster”
Th e qualifying adjectives and adverbials alongside the noun head are commonly temporal and spatial , but the nouns are often highly evalua- tive . Naming terms used in 2012 are even more likely to be negative (by proportion) than they are in 2011, and this follows a pattern from 2010.
“Disaster” is now as commonly used as “oil spill”, increasing the number of negative references that together now account for 44 % of mentions.
In Summary
Over the three-year period, naming terms:
• Are drawn from a smaller pool of terms, with the consensus clustering around “oil spill” and “disaster”.
• Increase in terms of number of words used in the descriptor. Th is is judged to be largely due to journalistic convention (the greater the distance from the events in time, the greater the need for specifi c
identifi cation). However, importantly, an increase in the length of the naming term does not entail an increase in the specifi city or the accu- racy of the overall description of events. Rather, these longer terms replace detailed descriptions, thereby reducing depth and accuracy and off ering a simplifi ed depiction of the events.
• Are increasingly likely to be negative in tone. Th is fi nding should be read in conjunction with the fi nding on modality, which suggests an increasing level of certainty about the nature of events and how we are to understand them.
Th e clustering around negative descriptors is unsurprising in itself, given the serious nature of the explosion and oil spill, and the media here acknowledge rather than in any sense downplay that seriousness. Th e question remains of how this negative naming of the events by the media is positioned: whether these negative shorthand terms are contextualised to suggest that events such as Deepwater Horizon are either regrettable but inevitable or aberrant and preventable. Th e regular use by the media of certain shared terms, however negatively shaded, can serve to familiarise and compartmentalise deviant phenomena such as crises, as much as mark them out as shocking.