"Xylella is the Enemy that Must be Fought": Representations of the X. Fastidiosa Bacterium in the Media Discourse.

ABSTRACT: The paper explores media representations of Xylella fastidiosa, the bacterium that causes severe plant diseases, using data from online sources in English which reported on the developments in the bacterium spreading and treatment from 2015 to 2020. Two directions of analysis are pursued, the quantitative and qualitative one. Quantitative analysis reveals that the bacterium and its effects are described via the terms belonging to the lexical fields of fear, diseases, change, the supernatural, hostility, destruction, killing and war, with the latter three being the most dominant statistically speaking. Further, qualitative analysis attests that some of these terms are used metaphorically as instantiations of the war metaphor, which is generally effective in communicating the severity

SUBMITTER: Pavlovic TV 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9629884 | biostudies-literature | 2022

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature