Content Details | NUML Online Research Repository

Title CLIMATE- CHANGE DISCOURSE: A CORPUS-BASED ECOCRITICAL STUDY OF THE UN CLIMATE ACTION SUMMIT SPEECHES

Author(s) MARIA QAYYUM

Abstract Ecolinguistics applies linguistic models to environmental texts to unveil the hidden ideologies or the stories. Stories are the mental models that influence human’s behaviour. People are unaware of these stories due to the implicit nature of the stories. There is a little research which analyses global climate change discourse by taking into account the stances of different political and non-political leaders and organizations using a thorough framework. This research unveils the hidden stories in the discourse of climate change. For this reason, 88 speeches and statements that were delivered in the UN Climate Action Summit 2019 were selected to compile corpus for the study. Stibbe’s (2015) eight story framework, which he describes in Ecolinguistics: Language, ecology and the stories we live by, has been used as a model to investigate different types of stories in the corpus. This study uncovers the stories in two steps; first a detailed lexical analysis of the corpus is done to identify the stories, then the stories are judged according to an ecosophy. Ecosophy of this study, that is used to evaluate the stories, is designed by following Stibbe’s (2015) ecosophy. The study found the stories of identity, metaphor, frame, conviction, evaluation, erasure and salience. Different linguistic features like trigger words, purr words, nominalizations and abstractions have been used in the construction of the stories. Trigger words have been frequently used in the construction of different stories. The stories are largely destructive and ambivalent in nature. The story of salience, which describes climate change vividly, is a beneficial story. The study calls for encouraging the beneficial stories and resisting the destructive stories and the destructive aspect of ambivalent stories by raising awareness about the harmful impacts of the destructive stories on ecosystem.

Type Thesis/Dissertation MS

Faculty Languages

Department English

Language English

Publication Date 2022-04-18

Subject

Publisher

Contributor(s)

Format

Identifier

Source

Relation

Coverage

Rights