Ecolinguistics: Positive Discourse and Language for Addressing Our Environmental Crisis
The relationship between language and ecology, conceived widely, comprises multiple strands. This collection focuses on Ecolinguistics in terms of the discoursal representation and meaning construction of the “natural environment” and human relationships with it. This places the collection within the tradition of Critical/Positive Discourse Analysis (CDA/PDA). Climate change, pollution and resource depletion are increasingly acknowledged as major threats to life and civilisation, and environmental discourse is implicated in this threat through the choices made within and between languages. Traditionally, however, CDA has challenged racist, sexist, and capitalist ideologies, involving competing groups and classes and conflicting identities. Our present crisis demands an ecologically-focused PDA, stressing and celebrating the interconnectedness and dynamic relationship of all social groups with the “natural” world. Though there is scope for critiquing the typically harmful and unscientific media constructions of “nature” and nature-human relationships, the collection’s emphasis is on alternative and more positive discourses. These may be in non-European (perhaps endangered) languages with their radically different constructions of nature and our place within it. The theories and techniques of analysis might include any of the following (overlapping) approaches: Narratology; Conceptual metaphor theory/(Critical) Metaphor analysis; Corpus linguistics; Multimodal analysis; Semantics and Pragmatics; Systemic-functional, Cognitive or other semantically-oriented lexico-grammars; Comparative linguistics; Ecostylistics.
Guest advisors
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Andrew Goatly(Lingnan University)
After studying English at Oxford University, and obtaining his PhD at University College London, supervised by the late Randolph Quirk, Andrew Goatly embarked on a teaching and research career in schools, colleges and universities in the UK, Rwanda, Thailand, Singapore, Austria, and Hong Kong. He is now retired in Canterbury, UK, but remains an Honorary Professor of Lingnan University, Hong Kong.