A Contrastive Analysis of Discursive Representations of EVs in Newspaper Coverage across Four Countries

Abstract

Driven by rapid technological innovation and industrial transformation, Electric Vehicles (EVs) have become the new center of the global automotive industry. Different media interpret the EV transition from different perspectives. This study combines corpus linguistics and Fairclough’s three-dimensional model to systematically analyze the reports on electric vehicles from People’s Daily from China, The New York Times from the United States, Süddeutsche Zeitung from Germany, and The Straits Times from Singapore. These newspapers are located in countries that play different roles in the transformation of global electric vehicles. The study found that although corporate and government sources dominate in the reports of the four newspapers, there are significant differences in the semantic classification of electric vehicles. The institutional positioning, information acquisition habits and domestic industrial environment of each newspaper all affect the content of its reports, thus shaping a specific cognition of electric vehicle transformation for readers. This study not only provides an empirical paradigm of cross-language and cross-country linguistic discourse analysis for the electronic entertainment industry in international communication, but also helps the industry to understand the global discourse ecosystem more deeply, and provides a practical reference for multinational enterprises to overcome cultural barriers and adapt to narrative differences between different markets.