The organization and functions of the press dossier : the case of media discourse on the environment in Portugal

Abstract

This study aims to analyze and explain the macrotextual organization and the most relevant pragmatic-communicative dimensions of a dossier from a daily newspaper in the Portuguese press on the theme of climate change. The study therefore is placed within the theoretical framework of Discourse Analysis, or more precisely the interface of textual genre studies (focusing in particular on press discourse) and Linguistic Pragmatics. The selected corpus is composed of texts from the November 30th, 1997 edition of Público, a recognised daily newspaper in the contemporary Portuguese press. This edition came out the day before the conference for the negotiation and signing of what would become known as the Kyoto Protocol.