Ecological Framing in Documentary Discourse: A Study of A Life on Our Planet
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54938/ijemdss.2026.05.2.667Keywords:
climate change, ecolinguistics, framing, documentary, trigger wordsAbstract
Climate crisis is a debatable issue among scholars of various disciplines. The framing of discourses in this regard plays a considerable role in presenting climate change in either a beneficial or a destructive way. The following paper investigates media representations of climate change in the context of documentary. The paper takes the theoretical framework of framing which integrates insights from ecolinguistics to analyse the ways climate change is framed linguistically. For the said purpose, the climate change documentary “A Life on our planet” by David Attenborough released in 2020 is chosen to analyze the framing techniques used to conceptualise the process of representation of the abstract phenomenon of climate change in media discourse through trigger words used as frames. The content analysis technique is used to identify trigger words that are later used to recognize frames. The findings reveal that climate change is most importantly presented in three significant frames: as an environmental catastrophe , as a decline , as a treasure.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Afshan Abbas
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Under the Creative Common Attribution (CC-BY 4.0) license, authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication.
