Seminar with PhD student John Currie.
In this seminar John Currie will present work on a research paper which is close to completion, and which I am working on with two other researchers: Ben Clarke and Daniel Lees Fryer. This is a diachronic study, examining how climate change is discursively constructed in UK parliamentary discourse over the ten years between 2014 and 2023. Studying the language used to communicate climate change is crucial as a means of understanding how the issue itself, as well as climate action, are perceived and acted on (e.g., Fløttum, 2017, p.7-8). Parliamentary discourse is, of course, important here, not only due to the social power that political decision-makers possess, but also as it is in parliament where the necessary legislative action can be taken to enact bold, societal-level mitigation and adaptation measures (e.g., Willis, 2020).
This study takes a corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS; e.g., Baker, 2023) approach and uses a fairly new tool within corpus linguistics – Usage Fluctuation Analysis (UFA; Brezina, 2018) – to track how discursive constructions of climate change remain consistent or shift between 2014 and 2023, via the collocational behaviour of the term climate (i.e. words which tend to occur in proximity to climate). Collocates are analysed with the help of three discourse analytical tools: 1) metaphor analysis, drawing on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (e.g., Lakoff & Johnson, 1980); 2) Halliday’s transitivity framework (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004); and 3) attitude within Martin and White’s (2005) appraisal framework. Results find certain consistent themes across the ten-year period, including the notion of UK exceptionalism/political boasting. Moreover, the period around 2018-2020 – coinciding with important activities such as the release of the IPCC special report, the formation of new climate activist groups, and increased climate protests – sees new themes emerge, including increased space given to the voices of scientists, activists, and young people, and more varied and nuanced journey metaphors pointing to more ambitious climate action. Some of these themes then stay in use throughout the remainder of the ten-year period, suggesting long-term shifts in how climate change is discursively constructed in UK parliamentary discourse.
Baker, P. (2023). Using corpora in discourse analysis (2nd ed.). Bloomsbury Academic.
Brezina, V. (2018). Statistics in corpus linguistics: a practical guide. Cambridge University Press.
Fløttum, K. (2017). Language and Climate Change. In Kjersti Fløttum (Ed.) The Role of Language in The Climate Change Debate (p.1-9). Routledge.
Halliday, M. A. K., & Matthiessen, C. M. I. M. (2004). Introduction to functional grammar. (3rd ed.). Arnold.
Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. The University of Chicago Press.
Martin, J., & White, P. (2005). The language of evaluation: Appraisal in English. MacMillan.
Willis, R. (2020). Too Hot to Handle? The Democratic Challenge of Climate Change. Bristol University Press.