Speaking of crisis : Urgency in train accident coverage

Sammanfattning

This thesis explores the construction of urgency in crisis journalism, specificallywith regard to train accidents, with the central case study being the 2023 Tempi traincrash in Greece. The argument is built on a corpus of 361 articles published over thefirst twenty-four hours of the event, and the study analyses linguistic and stylisticmarkers that impart immediacy to news narratives. It employs mixed-methodsdesign involving computational corpus stylistics and qualitative analysis to identifyand operationalise features including syntactic brevity, modality, process verb types,temporal framing and modes of discourse presentation.Urgency has preserved narrative constancy in Greek crisis reporting by means ofshort sentences, minimal epistemic hedging, and a preferred use of relationalprocesses and embedded voices. However, immediacy is created not throughcategorical lexical urgency markers but rather, through sparse syntax, categoricaldeontic modality, and the combination of eyewitness with institutional voices. Theseobservations support and contradict given models of narrative urgency and indicatethat Greek journalism may incorporate culturally specific versions of those models.The second angle of contribution is methodological. It argues for the availability ofa systematic media discourse analysis framework by combining digital tools andstylistic theory. The analysis reaffirms narrative urgency by showing how it capturescomputational stylistics mechanism immediately in crisis reporting.