An Analytic Approach for Exploring the Meaning Construction of Discourse Objects in the Framework of Lexical Item

Teubert (2010) defined discourse objects as any concrete or abstract concepts of entities, properties, states, actions and processes which are talked about in discourse and presented by lexical items.This research aims to establish an analytic approach for constructing the meaning of discourse objects in the framework of lexical items proposed by Sinclair (2004a) .To be specific, this research attempts to scrutinize how the meaning of COVID-19 virus is constructed in the "American COVID-19 virus discourse".With "virus" as the core, we can find many different lexical items.Some are independent but most of them are partially overlapped and interwoven into a complex semantic web.From the web, we can clearly see how the discourse community of American online newspapers and magazines constructs the meaning of virus in COVID-19 discourse.Moreover, we can also detect the attitudinal meanings hidden behind the lexical items of virus.In addition, when dealing with the meaning of discourse subjects, the model of lexical items becomes more flexible in actual operation.This study is significant in that it would shed light on designing approaches to corpus-driven critical discourse analysis and the pseudo-codes in automatic retrieval of lexical items from a corpus.