Critical Discourse Analysis of Media Texts on Unexplored Marine Discoveries: Constructing Mystery and Wonder

Abstract

This study applies Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to examine how contemporary news media construct discourses of mystery and wonder around unexplored marine discoveries, including deep-sea exploration, newly documented species, submerged geological formations, and unidentified oceanic phenomena. Drawing on Fairclough's three-dimensional model of discourse, van Dijk's socio-cognitive approach, and Halliday's systemic functional linguistics, the analysis identifies recurring lexical, rhetorical, and narrative strategies through which media texts frame the ocean as a frontier of the unknown. A purposive corpus of thirty English-language news articles and documentary transcripts published between 2019 and 2025 was analyzed using qualitative textual analysis supported by corpus-assisted keyword extraction. Findings reveal four dominant discursive strategies: (1) the lexicalization of mystery through modal and evidential hedging, (2) the personification and mythologization of marine environments, (3) the strategic juxtaposition of scientific authority with speculative narrative, and (4) the use of visual-verbal intertextuality to amplify affective engagement. The study argues that these strategies serve both an epistemic function, popularizing marine science, and an ideological function, reproducing anthropocentric and sometimes sensationalist framings of nature that can shape public perception of ocean conservation priorities. The paper concludes with implications for science journalism practice and recommendations for further multimodal CDA research on environmental reporting.