Quantifying Modal Density in Climate Change Discourse: A Multimodal Analysis

This paper examines modal density, a concept introduced in Discourse Analysis by Norris [2004, 2009], in news media. Modal density combines intensity (modal prominence) and complexity (modal interactions), and is believed to vary across media genres and speech acts in climate change communication. Using data from UCLA’s NewsScape corpus, 500 short video clips from genres such as news reports, talk shows, weather forecasts and political speeches were analyzed. The study measured modal intensity and complexity across speech, prosody, and visual resources. Findings highlight differences across genres and speech acts, offering insights into multimodal strategies that promote public engagement with climate change. The study also introduces a quantitative method to compare modal density across genres, which improves our understanding of ecological discourse.