Project overview

'Carbon compounds':

Lexical creativity and discourse formations in the context of climate change

(Funded by the ESRC, 2008-2010)

Brigitte Nerlich (PI): brigitte.nerlich@nottingham.ac.uk

Nelya Koteyko (co-I): nk158@le.ac.uk

“Lacking Carbon Fibre: Our spirits want to save the planet, but sometimes our flesh is weak.” (The Times, 23/04/07, p. 16)

“Carbon capture caveats.” (New Scientist, 05/05/07, p.25)

Introduction

Climate change is a multi-faceted problem, requiring insights from climate science, economics, the social sciences, the humanities and engineering (Turnpenny et al., 2005; Newsletter EU research in SSH, 2007). Although some research has been carried out from the perspective of the humanities (Doyle, 2007; Hulme, in press), more research is needed into the ways the media and the public make sense of this complex issue. The 20th century was the century of ‘the gene’ whose meaning has been studied by many social scientists (e.g. Condit, 1999; Keller, 2000). The 21st century will be the century of ‘carbon’ whose meaning still needs to be studied, preferably before we enter the era of what some have begun to call ‘a post-carbon society’. One way to do this is through the study of lexical creativity around ‘carbon compounds’.

The issues of global warming and climate change have recently attracted immense media coverage. Advice on how to reduce one’s ‘carbon footprint’ is provided almost daily in newspapers, adverts, books, on websites and even in soap operas. Much of this advice is framed by using ‘carbon compounds’ - lexical combinations of at least two roots - such as ‘carbon finance’, ‘carbon sinner’, or ‘low carbon diet’. These are only some of the numerous discursive and metaphorical clusters that have emerged recently around 'carbon' as the hub. A whole new language is evolving that needs to be monitored and investigated in order to discover how climate change is framed by various stakeholders, how public attitudes and perceptions are shaped and what solutions to climate change and global warming are proposed. How to ‘solve’ this problem has exercised policy makers, NGOs and environmental managers all over the world. New national and international policies, regulations and messages are devised almost daily. However, the problem of how to gain popular support for such regulations and assure compliance with them has not yet attracted enough research. Is it better to coerce or persuade in this context? ‘Communicating climate change’ is a complex activity in which many different stakeholders engage for a variety purposes and in order to achieve various results. Our ‘bottom up’ approach, studying the use of ‘carbon compounds’ in context, will provide a tool for mapping these activities, assessing their potential impact and listening to the voices of people active in various relevant fields of interest.

Aims and objectives

The overall aim of the project is to study the ‘meaning of carbon’ at the beginning of the 21^st century and to reveal the 'linguistic signatures' of climate change discourses used by major climate change stakeholders in order to raise critical awareness about implicit and explicit ideological framing.

The project will chart emergent discourse coalitions, dominant storylines, core beliefs, preferred imagery, principal framing devices, and the implicit assumptions attached to them. The results will provide policy makers, scientists and NGOs with a ‘conceptual map’ of the linguistic landscape on which the battle for environmental communication is being fought, with sign-posts marking sites of major communicational conflicts and pointers indicating how they might be discursively resolved. The focus will be on linguistic developments in the UK, but lexical creativity in the US and the wider English speaking world will also be monitored.

The project has the following objectives, to:

1) chart the process of lexical creativity from 1990 to 2007;

2) examine how such lexical combinations were used in debates about climate change in the UK, the US and world-wide by various social groups, by policy makers, NGOs, the media, etc.;

3) determine in what arguments they are embedded, what entailments they have and what actions they call for;

4) assess the ethical, social, political implications of the major climate change discourses and

5) evaluate the usefulness of a new linguistic method for science and technology studies in general and the study of the interaction of climate science and society in particular.

The results emerging from the project should enable stakeholders to become more aware of and increase their reflection/reflexivity of the discursive tools they use. This would avoid discursive ‘lock-in’, make possible more realistic and less polarized debates and facilitate public engagement.

Methods and conceptual background

Social scientists have investigated the discourse of environmental politics in general and climate change in particular for more than a decade (Hajer, 1995, 2002, 2006; Hajer/Versteeg, 2005; Weingart, 1998). More recently, climate change scientists themselves have begun to reflect on the words they use to communicate with the public – especially after the recent publication of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report (www.ipcc.ch/). Some are worried about ‘discursive overbidding’ and alarmism (Hulme, 2007); some are worried about scientists’ reticence to communicate (Hansen, 2007). Policy makers in the UK and the US are beginning to see the importance of discursive framing when it comes to winning or losing the ‘environmental communication battle’ (Burkeman, 2003). Some critics and activists use the tools of discourse, metaphor and frame analysis to examine current climate change discourses in order to shape future discourses, messages and actions. The FrameWorks Institute has, for example, been involved in rephrasing announcements to the American public about climate change and has been involved in the Climate Message Project (Brahic, 2007); Futerra - Sustainable Communications have advised the UK government on a climate change communications strategy (see Futerra, 2007). It is now time to examine in more detail how ‘climate communication’ works and how meaning is generated in this context. We will use a range of methods derived from advances in discourse analysis, lexical pragmatics and corpus linguistics to so. Some are traditionally used in the social study of science and in the study of science communication; some are more novel, especially the study of lexical creativity and the use of corpus linguistic and webometric techniques. The project therefore does not only deal with a novel topic but also introduces new types of linguistic analysis to science and technology studies. The field of science communication and the study of ‘public understanding of science’, too, will benefit from this injection of innovative methods.

Rhetorical formations and discourse formations

Social scientists have demonstrated the usefulness of discourse analysis and metaphor analysis to illuminate important issues in science and society that emerged during the 20^th century, such as genetics and genomics (Nerlich et al, eds., 2004; Nerlich/Hellsten, 2004; Nerlich/Kidd, eds., 2005). The shifting meanings of the notion of ‘gene’ in particular have attracted attention from a range of analysts (Condit, 1999, 2001; Turney, 2005). Condit explains that it is useful to think of groups of circulating utterances in terms of rhetorical formations, defined as the “relatively co-occurrent sets of discourse - metaphors, narratives, [and] values - surrounding a given theme in a particular period” (Condit, 1999: 14). Other scholars working in the field of social semiotics, such as Lemke in Talking Science (1990), have advocated the study of broader discourse formations - particular, recognizable combination of thematics, genre, and stylistic choices of rhetorical strategies and word-choices. This ties in with Potter and Wetherall’s (1995) research into ‘interpretative repertoires’. A study by Ereaut/Segnit (2006) pioneered linguistic research into how climate change is being communicated and discussed in the UK, and how it might be connecting or failing to connect with mass audiences. Using techniques from discourse analysis and semiotics, they analysed a sample of UK newspapers, advertisements and websites and found that 'the climate change discourse in the UK today looks confusing, contradictory and chaotic'. It was nevertheless possible to identify three groups of 'climate change repertoires' and discuss their role in changing public perceptions. The ineffectiveness of existing communication models lead Ereaut/Segnit (2006) to conclude that climate-change communications should be treated in the same way as brand communications, i.e. climate-friendly everyday activity should be treated as a brand that can be sold. As this study was limited to a set of UK data collected between 2005 and 2006, a more comprehensive approach is necessary to explore a wider range of material, in more detail and over a longer period. However, none of these approaches has as yet used the study of lexical compounds to gain access to such discourse formations.

Frames and discourse coalitions

Like discourse analysis, frame analysis has been used, in one version or another, by social scientists and STS researchers. More recently, policy makers themselves have begun to use it to change people’s perceptions and actions regarding climate change, an activity that itself needs to be monitored by social scientists (Penz, in prep.). According to Entman (1993: 53), to frame is “to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item prescribed.” Frames (words, metaphors, storylines and images) can thus “diagnose, evaluate and prescribe”. They call attention to some aspects of reality while obscuring other elements, which may promote different reactions in audiences. Politicians seeking support for certain policies or views are thus “compelled to compete with each other and with journalists over news frames” (p. 55). But not only politicians, journalists and advocates use frames, “[f]rames [...] allow citizens to rapidly identify why an issue matters, who might be responsible, and what should be done.” (Nisbet/Mooney, 2007; Nisbet/Scheufele, 2007) Determining who chooses what frame for what purposes is therefore extremely important. Again, one important framing tool, the lexical compound, which packs a lot of information into two or more words has been overlooked. We will study rhetorical formations, discourse formations and discourse coalitions through the lens of lexical creativity surrounding ‘carbon’ as the hub, a novel approach that might yield new insights in a context where lexical creativity seems to drive forward and reflect various debates about climate change.

Lexical creativity, pragmatics and corpus linguistics

Lexical creativity is the topic of cognitive semantics on the one hand (Aitchison, 1994; Wisniewski, 1997, 1998; Estes/Glucksberg, 2000) and lexical pragmatics on the other (Blutner, 2002; Gibbs, 2002; Sperber/Wilson, 2002). Lexical pragmatics is a rapidly developing branch of linguistics which investigates the processes by which linguistically-specified (‘literal’) word meanings are modified in use. Both fields are interested in the systematic and explanatory account of pragmatic phenomena that are connected with the semantic underspecification of lexical items, such as the interpretation of compounds, such as ‘headache pill’, ‘fertility pill, and ‘morning after pill’ (Blutner, 1999; Atlas, 2005). Recent pragmatic theories can be fruitfully applied in contemporary discourse analytic research intended to reveal and explain implicit meanings. In this project, we aim to demonstrate that pragmatics can be an important ally not only for the branch of discourse analysis known as ‘critical’ discourse analysis (see Wodak, 2007), but also for discourse studies in the STS tradition.

Corpus linguistic methods and tools such as concordances, word and keyword lists (Sinclair, 1991), developed for processing large volumes of real language data, are a valuable supplement for the above fields concerned with the modifications of meanings in everyday use. The project will draw on recent applications of corpus linguistics in discourse analysis (Carter, 2004; Orpin, 2005; Dillon, 2006; Koteyko 2006; Renouf, in press; Koteyko et al., in press) and metaphor research (Charteris-Black, 2004; Deignan, 2005; Nerlich/Koteyko, in press) to gain a deeper understanding of discourse formation, the emergence of discourse coalitions and the discursive structuring of arguments relating to global warming and climate change.

Techniques of webometrics, which can be broadly described as the study of the quantitative aspects of the construction and use of information resources, structures, and technologies on the web, will be used to collect and classify the data.

Programme of work

The project is organised in three discrete, but closely related substantive work packages, plus a final phase for analysis and dissemination. A basic literature review has already been carried out by a student working on an intern project ‘Mapping the emergent discourse of 'carbon-ethics’ at ISS. After a more comprehensive review of social science and humanities research and government documents focused on climate change and global warming, three work packages further develop the research questions stated at the beginning of the proposal.

Workpackage 1: Identification of ‘carbon compounds’ (1990-2007) (months 1-8).

As a pilot study has shown, compounds using ‘carbon’ as a lexical hub began to emerge in Britain around 1990, followed by what one might call a lexical explosion around 2004. The aim of this WP is to identify and map the use of creative compounds from 1990’s onwards and identify their main users (objectives 1 and 2). Four corpora or data sets will be collected.

As the web presents a useful source of electronically available data, all texts concerned with carbon discourses will be compiled from online sources (using ‘carbon’ as a search term to identify relevant texts). Corpus 1 will be made up of UK newspaper texts downloaded from Lexis Nexis professional. Corpus 2 will consist of texts from US newspapers, again using Lexis Nexis professional. As there is currently no doubt that the issue of climate change has resonated with the public world-wide and therefore ought to be reflected to some extent in blogspace, Corpus 3 will be compiled from Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds using blog-searching engines such as e.g. www.blogdigger.com and querying large databases such as completeRSS.com (Thelwall/Prabowo, 2007). RSS feeds are summaries of the updates of web sites or other information sources, such as news feeds. The rationale for using RSS feeds for automatic analyses are that they allow large collections of blogs and other sources to be efficiently monitored, and also appear to lend themselves to efficient classification (Thelwall et al, 2006). Corpus 4 will be compiled from web-based texts (other than blogs) identified with the help of our multiple method approach described below. Systematic identification techniques are necessary to track hybrid word families that arise spontaneously in different contexts. To identify members of such families around ‘carbon’ we will use a multiple method approach (Thelwall/Price, 2006) based on 1) word searches by predicted forms; 2) wildcards in search engines; 3) vocabulary searching, using SocSciBot 3 (http://socscibot.wlv.ac.uk) to crawl the websites identified during stage 2. All automatic data mining, classification, and monitoring of blog feeds will be carried our in consultation with Professor Mike Thelwall (University of Wolverhampton) who specializes in web link analysis and web text analysis from an information science perspective (webometrics and cybermetrics).

Once relevant texts are identified and compiled into corpora, concordancing and clustering tools of WordSmith software (Scott, 1999) will be used to isolate creative collocations involving ‘carbon’. In this way, we will be able to identify any derivatives from the noun ‘carbon’ or other ‘creative’ lexis dominant in the climate change debate. Word and word combinations with ‘carbon’ will be arranged into tables and charts according to sources, countries and social groups.

Workpackage 2: Analysis of clusters of carbon compounds in wider discourse context (months 6-12)

Building on the work done in WP1, this WP will use methods of discourse and frame analysis, pragmatics and corpus linguistics to examine the wider discourse context in which the carbon compounds identified in WP2 are used (e.g. which rhetorical formations they form), by whom (by which discourse coalitions), and for what rhetorical purpose. The aim is to analyse how clusters of carbon compounds are used across discourses and over time in debates about climate change by various social groups in two major English speaking nations and world-wide (research question 2) and to determine in what arguments they are embedded, what entailments they have and what actions they call for (objective 3). This will involve a closer qualitative and quantitative study of the lexical surroundings of the compounds to reveal what ‘aura of meaning’ (Sinclair, 1991; Louw, 1993) they have and with what moral, political or ethical ‘overtones’ they are used. Concordances together with ‘Enlarge context’ function of WordSmith software will be used to scan all the contexts in order to pick up emerging themes and regularities. The ‘View text’ function will be employed whenever there is a need to check the analysts’ intuitions against the whole text.

Pilot work has identified four major discursive clusters of carbon compounds in the UK: a moral and religious cluster (e.g. ‘carbon sinner’, ‘carbon guilt’, ‘carbon criminal’ etc.); a dietary cluster (‘low carbon diet’; ’carbon calories’, ’carbon calorie counter’, etc.); a financial cluster (‘carbon trading’, ‘carbon finance’, ‘carbon market’ etc.), but there are many more clusters that need to be explored, together with overarching compounds, such as ‘carbon footprint’. Using the US and UK corpora, we will ask whether different compounds emerged or whether the same ones had different contextual implications; what the possible trigger events were for their emergence, such as, in the case of the US, hurricane Katrina, the Iraq war, fears about fossil fuels running out, Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth or, in the case of the UK, the 2003 heatwave, the 2005 Exeter conference on dangerous climate change (Hogan, 2005), the Stern report (Stern, 2007) etc. We shall further examine how arguments using compounds recruit other discourse traditions, religious, dietary and so on, to frame arguments around policy, democracy, human rights, corporate responsibility, corporate greed or individual actions intended to contribute to climate change mitigation or adaptation activities.

Workpackage 3: Assessing the implications of lexical framing (months 12-18)

This WP will bring together the results achieved in WPs 1 and 2. The aim is twofold. To confront stakeholders with the results achieved and stimulate discussion about its implications. In order to achieve this, we will bring together a wide variety of stakeholders in a stakeholder workshop. Up to 30 representatives from relevant stakeholder groups and members of ‘the public’ will be invited to attend a national one-day ‘user workshop’. Participants will be invited to discuss the ethical, social, and political implications of a variety of lexical framing devices revealed in the study (objective 4) and the usefulness of the study of lexical creativity for science/society research (objective 5). They will be asked in particular about the implications that various lexical ‘stimuli’ might have for public understanding of global warming and how they may help or hinder public understanding of the issues and attempts to change attitudes and behaviours. The workshop will be held under Chatham House rules. Discussions will be recorded and transcripts will be anonymised and analysed using the methods outlined above. Results will be compared and contrasted with the other WPs. Over and above generating further data for the project the workshop is intended to raise critical awareness of the language used in climate change and to further upstream engagement between stakeholders/users and the academics involved in the project.

Months 19 to 24 of the project will be used to bring all materials together in preparation for output, writing up and further dissemination. Both Edinburgh University Press and Earthscan have expressed interest in a book publication based on the results of the project.