What’s in a wor(l)d? A comparative corpus-based study of environmental lexicon

In recent decades, the prominence granted to discourses regarding the environment, ecology and climate change has progressed from a soft breeze to a howling gale. This is due, in the main, to the escalation of cataclysmic, environmentally related events and to the consequent social and political interest that has given rise to the mobilization of novel organisations, bodies and, of course, words. This study focuses on the evolving environmentally related lexicon and the new meanings/acceptations that have progressively arisen, be they emergent or born of the combination of pre-existing terms and lemmas. Investigation will be carried out across two different corpora: the EcoLexicon (an English language corpus of contemporary environmental texts) present on the Sketch Engine online text analysis tool, and a collection of texts gathered from the digital version of the weekly magazine the Economist. The time span exploited for the study stretches from the 1990s to current day, and the texts under analysis belong to both British and American variants. The quantitative data will be investigated from an ecolinguistic-discursive perspective (Stibbe 2014, 2015, 2016; Fill 1998; Garrard 2014; Haugen 1972; Mühlhäusler and Peace 2006; Robbins 2012), supported by the appraisal framework (the attitude subsystem). By means of reverse engineering across all semantic, grammatical, and syntactic structures, and with a particular focus on grammatical metaphor, we will attempt to illustrate how certain terms and clusters of linguistic features can come together to construct specific worldviews or ‘cultural codes’ (Gavriely-Nuri 2012, 80). Indeed, linguistic research on climate change mainly pertains to the relatively recent domain of ecolinguistics, whose main aim is to raise awareness of the role language can play in ecological destruction or protection. Accordingly, the emerging terminological and lexical issues are considered from an integrated methodological approach that also takes cultural-pragmatic implications into account. References: Fill, A.F. 1998. Ecolinguistics: State of the art 1998. Aaa-arbeiten Aus Anglistik Und Amerikanistik, 23, 3- 16. Garrard G. 2014. The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gavriely-Nuri, D. 2012. Israeli Peace Discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Haugen, E. 1972. The ecology of language. In: Dil, Anwar S. (ed.), The Ecology of Language: Essays by Einar Haugen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 325–339. Mühlhäusler, P. 2000a. Humboldt, Whorf and the roots of ecolinguistics. In: M. Pütz & M. Verspoor (eds.), Explorations in Linguistic Relativity. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 89–99. Mühlhäusler P. 2000 Language Planning and Language Ecology. Current Issues in Language Planning, 1:3, 306-367, DOI: 10.1080/14664200008668011. Mühlhäusler, P., & Fill, A. 2001. The Ecolinguistics Reader: Language, Ecology and Environment. London and New York: Continuum. Mühlhäusler, P., & Peace, A. 2006. Environmental discourses. Annual Review of Anthropology, 35(1), 457- 479. doi: 10.1146/annurev.anthro.35.081705.123203. Petit G., Haillet P & Salvador X.L. (eds.) 2017, La dénomination: lexique et discours, Champion, Paris. Robbins, P. 2012. Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction (2nd edn). Oxford and Malden, MA: Wiley and Blackwell. Stibbe, A. 2014. An Ecolinguistic Approach to Critical Discourse Studies. Critical Discourse Studies 11.1 117-128. Stibbe, A. “Ecolinguistics: The Search for New Stories to Live By.” Paper presented at a seminar in Catania (Italy), 7 September 2016. http://www.cadaad2016.unict.it/ Stibbe, A. 2015. Ecolinguistics: Language, Ecology and the Stories We Live By. London: Routledge. Talebi-Dastenaei, M. and Poshtvan, H. 2018. A Critical Review of Ecolinguistic Studies in Iran. International Ecolinguistics Association, 1-10. The International Ecolinguistics Association, About, http://ecolinguistics-association.org/ [last accessed 10 January 2021].