How British Newspapers Represent Road Collisions: A Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Study

Abstract

This paper examines how British newspapers represent road collisions, drawing on corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of 5434 articles (4.26 million words) published over three years (2017–2019). It asks what the most frequent reference to road collisions is and how it is used, and how crash, collision, and the plural forms compare with it. Findings indicate that the term accident is the most frequent reference, and its typical collocates relate to situational context, negative consequences—particularly death and injury—and humans. The language of reporting often has the effect of deflecting blame from drivers and dramatising collisions, and episodic reporting appears more frequently than thematic. Crash is the preferred headline term, but all references share the same agentless grammar. General factors such as alcohol and mobile phone use are named more often with the plural forms, when newspapers report aggregate figures rather than individual collisions. Guidelines that only replace accident with crash or collision therefore change the word but not the grammar. The findings suggest that British newspaper reporting may naturalise road danger, obscure responsibility, and reproduce a public discourse in which the systemic causes of collisions remain largely invisible.