A CRITICAL REVIEW OF MEDIA DISCOURSE STUDIES ON JAPAN’S NUCLEAR WASTEWATER DISCHARGE
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.55197/qjssh.v7i1.954Keywords:
discourse construction, ideological representation, nuclear wastewater discharge, critical review, media discourseAbstract
On August 24, 2023, Japan began discharging nuclear wastewater (DNW) into the sea, sparking a strong international opposition. This study adopts a narrative review approach, it critically examines 15 media discourse studies related to DNW published between 2021 and 2025 from a linguistic perspective. The data in this study is sourced from Chinese, Japanese, and English scholarly platform. It evaluates the strengths and limitations of current research and proposes directions for future studies. The findings reveal that seven main themes are identified: Corpus Linguistic (CL), Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), transitivity analysis, nominalization and passivization, media discourse strategies and ideology. And key trends are traced in terms of research focus, theories, methods, corpus use, and findings. The study reveals a strong reliance on corpus-driven SFL and CDA. Yet recurring weaknesses remain in theoretical integration, coding transparency, and reliability checks. Despite these limitations, the review highlights interdisciplinarity and technical innovation in recent studies. It further recommends extending research beyond mainstream media to include social media narratives, adopting multimodal comparative designs, and standardizing reliability reporting to advance discourse-based environmental risk communication research.
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