Discourse construction of Inter-Korean summits in South Korean newspapers: A diachronic study

This article represents a diachronic corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of South Korean news reports on inter-Korean summits in 2000, 2007, and 2018. By examining similarities and differences between conservative and liberal newspaper corpora, the study identifies discursive shifts that took place between the first and second summit in accordance with developments and changes in inter-Korean relations. The comparative analysis indicates that a cluster of discursive changes in media attention and source di-versity facilitates the recontextualisation of the peace talks into multilateral international negotiations on the Korean peninsula. The contrastive study reveals that discursive con -tests between newspapers reproduce ideological conflicts despite increased media coverage of diplomatic ceremony. ? 2021 The Author. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).