From crisis to control : the framing of water in Italian climate discourse

This research aims to examine how hydro-climatic phenomena – specifically glacial melting and sea level rise – are discursively framed in contemporary Italian media. To address the thematic and lexical limitations of general-purpose corpora, a dedicated dataset was compiled, consisting of 3,040 articles published between 2022 and 2024 in The Post Internazionale. The analysis focuses on two editorial sections, Politica (Politics) and Ambiente (Environment), combining methods from corpus linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis to explore lexical patterns, rhetorical strategies, and discursive positioning. The study investigates how environmental meanings are constructed across these journalistic contexts, and how such representations reflect or resist dominant ideological frameworks. In doing so, it highlights the role of media language in shaping public understandings of climate change, and considers how institutional discourse may contribute to – or constrain – more critical engagement with ecological issues.