Browsing by Author "Marcella, Vanessa"

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    Ecolinguistic changes in climate emergency: an investigation into climate-related tweets in Europe and the United States
    (Università della Calabria, 2023-10-10) Marcella, Vanessa; Raniolo, Francesco; Ruffolo, Ida
    Climate change is an environmental, social, cultural, and political phenomenon and has become one of the most important challenges in the twenty-first century (Hulme, 2009). The greatest divergence about climate change lies in the multitude and contrasting messages we receive and the different ways we interpret them (Hulme, 2009). Previous research focused primarily on the discourse of environmental politics in general and climate change in particular, in order to identify underlying ideologies (Halliday, 1990; Hajer, 2002; Hajer & Versteeg, 2005). However, to the best of my knowledge, these studies have not investigated into linguistic variations in environmental discourses or their influence on the emergence of new words. Recently, a growing number of researchers has analyzed climate change in social-networking-based communications, focusing on linguistic variations and lexical creativity in environmental discourses (Jang & Hart, 2015; Kirilenko & Stepchenkova, 2014; Kirilenko et al., 2015; Koteyko & Atanasova, 2016; Veltri & Atanasova, 2015). Neverthless, most studies are synchronic or have a local focus. Therefore, since climate change is a global discussion that evolves through time, a comparative, long-term study, involving different types of stakeholders from the U.S.A. and Europe, would be of great interest for the field. In light of this, the objective of this research is to examine how stakeholders directly act through their language using the social network Twitter, from 2015 to 2020. The main focus is on language variation and lexical innovations which reflect environmental, cultural, and political changes in English usage considered as a universal language for a global problem. In the present work, three research questions are addressed and five hypotheses are tested to analyze to what extent language varies among the different users, i.e., social movements, activists, politicians, NGOs, new sites and institutional organizations. Particularly, tweets and specific metadata are compiled into a corpus of Twitter data used for comparative analysis. Indeed, this research follows a corpus-based approach with mixed methods. A quantitative approach to corpus linguistics is used to determine the frequency of terms, identify new lexical items and collocates, and to find differences between time, place, and people. A qualitative approach is adopted for the manual annotation of polarity of new items, and to carry out discourse analysis and a framing approach. The study highlights the pivotal role played by climate change communication, framing, discourse, and language in conveying messages and constructing meanings, just as much as the use of the social media Twitter can contribute to the strenghthening of voices, actions, and scope. Specifically, the results show how climate change is depicted and discussed by the different stakeholders over time in the European Union and the United States. Social movements are the leading authors, along with climate activists. Through the analysis of their discourse and lexical innovations, their communicative function is mainly aimed to inform, educate and mobilize their audience. In addition, climate strikes, protests, and participation in summits and conferences during this period reflect the primary frames these authors used, such as call to action, civil society protest, and attribution of blame. The news sites analyzed in this study emphasize facts, scientific evidence, and disaster and catastrophe issue-specific frames to shed light on risks, encourage action, and address responsibility. Furthermore, NGOs also deal with the same issue from a variety of perspectives, promoting healthier, environmentally friendly behaviors and providing unbiased information about disasters and risks. While promoting a dominant economic discourse, European politicians engage continuously with environmental issues. On the contrary, political campaigns and periodic disagreements tend to polarize and politicize U.S. climate discourse over the years. Finally, organizations confirm a close connection with political orientations, especially in the United States. Lastly, this work includes pedagogical implications for English for Specific Purposes courses. The section highlights how the use of authentic material, sucha as messages retrieved from social media platforms, may further motivate learners with different levels of language proficiency to deal with specific topics using concrete language samples. Hence analyzing linguistic and discoursive aspects of climate-related matters, through interdisciplinary approaches, could contribute to increasing learners' awareness regarding crucial topics sucha as climate change, climate justice, and sustainable development.