THE LANGUAGE(S) OF SUSTAINABILITY

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THE LANGUAGE(S) OF SUSTAINABILITY
A corpus-assisted critical discourse study between ESP and popularisation

This volume explores the language of sustainability through a criti¬cal analysis of discourse supported by corpus linguistics. The study aims to fill an existing research gap on the language of sustainability both in the broad sense – regardless of the numerous declinations of this multidisciplinary subject – and across different textual genres. In particular, the corpus includes texts on sustainability from the areas of scientific, institutional, corporate, and media communication.
In the first part of the volume, the language of sustainability is ex¬amined in its lexical and terminological, grammatical, syntactic, and pragmatic features, both in general and within the four genres con¬sidered. As part of specialised languages, sustainability knowledge and terminology are subject to popularisation processes, with po¬tential instances of manipulation in the transition between the var¬ious genres. Therefore, after considering genre, domain, and medi¬um specificities, the analysis illustrates some popularisation steps by observing keywords, collocations, concordances, and thematic nodes in the four sub-corpora. The second part of the volume presents a critical analysis of sustainability discourse by focussing on framing strategies and the representation of social actors in a wide selection of examples. In addition to traditional frames, the qualitative investi¬gation proposes an ‘environmental frame’, informed by ecolinguistics, to evaluate the centrality of environmental motifs in sustainability discourses. Overall, this study contributes to the literature on sus¬tainability by expanding the existing knowledge of this subject in the field of language and discourse studies.

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