An Emerging Climate Change or a Changing Climate Emergency? A corpus-driven discourse study on newspapers published in England

During 2019, it became increasingly popular for countries to declare a climate emergency – often on demand of their citizens. As such, the term ‘climate emergency’ had a significant increase in usage and got dubbed the Word of the Year 2019. In an effort to investigate discourses around ‘climate emergency’, I used a combination of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis with framing theory, as used in ecolinguistics, and compared with ‘climate change’; the UK parliamentary climate emergency declaration was used as the point of comparison. I compiled a corpus of almost 100,000 words (consisting of news articles) for each term in the time period Jan-Aug 2019 (four months before and after the declaration). The results showed that there were three overlapping frames (politics, problem, threat) – as well as three unique frames for ‘climate change’ (war, cause, predicament). There were no differences in what frames occurred before and after the climate emergency declaration, but there were differences in the words included in the frames – both in terms of frequency and what words were used