In the Air We Breathe: A Corpus-Assisted Discourse Study of Climate Change in the Language of UK Politicians and Activists

Abstract

Global temperatures continue to rise, yet climate change is so embedded in society that effective climate action is challenging. Studying the ways in which climate change is discursively constructed is important, because climate change is caused in part through the ways that humans understand, and communicate about, the world around them. Actions taken to mitigate or adapt to climate change must, moreover, first be articulated in language. Politicians and climate activists are two important voices within climate change discourse, capable of necessary large-scale political and collective action. However, few corpus-assisted discourse studies have examined how either group communicates climate change. This PhD thesis contains four research papers which collectively examine the ways in which climate change is communicated and understood in UK parliamentary discourse and UK climate activist website discourse between 2014 and 2023. The years studied most closely are those between 2018 and 2020: capturing the release of the 2018 IPCC special report, a surge in climate change protest, and the declaration of a climate emergency by the UK Parliament in 2019. The methodological approach is corpus-assisted discourse studies, identifying and analysing both qualitative and quantitative linguistic patterns and trends. The methodology is underpinned by ecolinguistics, Systemic Functional Linguistics, and Conceptual Metaphor Theory. Six broad themes are identified which occur in the language of both politicians and climate activists to varying degrees: 1) war/conflict metaphors, 2) emergency/crisis, 3) journey metaphors, 4) nature, 5) agency and responsibility, and 6) financial rewards and technological fixes. Politicians discuss economic and technological solutions comparatively more often than activists who, in turn, devote more space to discussions of fossil fuel and nature. Certain linguistic patterns are found to be more destructive – such as obscuring human agency in the ‘fight’ against climate change – or beneficial – such as emphasising the role of fossil fuel companies in ‘accelerating’ climate change – in terms of communicating climate change. Furthermore, discursive constructions alter over the time period under study, in particular around the year 2019. At this time, politicians begin to frequently quote climate activists in parliament, discussing climate change in new ways as they do so. This research advances understanding of how climate change is discursively constructed by two important groups within the UK and identifies effective and dangerous means of understanding and communicating climate change.