The Language(s) of Sustainability. A Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Study between ESP and Popularisation

This volume explores the language of sustainability through a critical 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 examined in its lexical and terminological, grammatical, syntactic, and pragmatic features, both in general and within the four genres considered. As part of specialised languages, sustainability knowledge and terminology are subject to popularisation processes, with possible cases of manipulation in the transition between the various genres. Therefore, after considering genre, domain, and medium specificities, the analysis illustrates some popularisation steps by observing keywords, collocations, concordances, and thematic nodes in the four sub-corpora. Furthermore, the second part of the volume presents a critical analysis of sustainability discourse by focussing on frames and social actors in a wide selection of examples. In addition to other frames, the qualitative investigation proposes an ‘environmental frame’, informed by ecolinguistics, to evaluate the centrality of environmental motifs in sustainability discourse. Overall, this study contributes to the literature on sustainability by expanding the existing knowledge of this subject in the field of language and discourse studies.