A changing climate of skepticism: The factors shaping climate change coverage in the US press

Skepticism toward climate change has a long tradition in the United States. We focus on mass media as the conveyors of the image of climate change and ask: Is climate change skepticism still a characteristic of US print media coverage? If so, to what degree and in what form? And which factors might pave the way for skeptics entering mass media debates? We conducted a quantitative content analysis of US print media during one year (1 June 2012 to 31 May 2013). Our results show that the debate has changed: fundamental forms of climate change skepticism (such as denial of anthropogenic causes) have been abandoned in the coverage, being replaced by more subtle forms (such as the goal to avoid binding regulations). We find no evidence for the norm of journalistic balance, nor do our data support the idea that it is the conservative press that boosts skepticism.

Lexical Pragmatics and Theory of Mind: The Acquisition of Connectives

The concept of theory of mind (ToM), a hot topic in cognitive psychology for the past twenty-five years, has gained increasing importance in the fields of linguistics and pragmatics. However, even though the relationship between ToM and verbal communication is now recognized, the extent, causality and full implications of this connection remain mostly to be explored. This book presents a comprehensive discussion of the interface between language, communication, and theory of mind, and puts forward an innovative proposal regarding the role of discourse connectives for this interface. The proposed analysis of connectives is tested from the perspective of their acquisition, using empirical methods such as corpus analysis and controlled experiments, thus placing the study of connectives within the emerging framework of experimental pragmatics.

On the theory of high and low pressure areas: The significance of divergence in pressure areas

This is the edited and translated version of the article by Richard Scherhag “Zur Theorie der Hoch- und Tiefdruckgebiete. Die Bedeutung der Divergenz in Druckfeldern” (On the theory of high and low pressure areas: The significance of divergence in pressure areas), which was published in Meteorologische Zeitschrift 51, 129–138.