Linguistic analysis on climate change discourse in American and European tweets

Climate change is an environmental, social, cultural and political phenomenon which has led to a bitter controversy among political leaders, social movements, and activists. In literature critical discourse analysis, framing theories, and cognitive linguistics have been the main approaches used to identify underlying ideologies (Halliday, 2001; Killingsworth & Palmer, 1992). Recently studies have analyzed climate change in social-networking -based communications, investigating on linguistic variations and lexical creativity in environmental discourses (Koteyko & Atanasova, 2016). However, most of them are synchronic or have a local focus. Therefore, a comparative, long-term study, on climate change as a global and enduring discussion, involving international stakeholders, would be of great contribution to the field. In view of the above considerations, this ongoing PhD project aims at investigating any linguistic differences and/or similarities and lexical innovations in climate change discourse. We do so by focusing on language variation in discourse use in relation to climate change in the micro-blogging service Twitter, and more specifically, on the use of English language by a new generation of young activists, NGOs, and American and European politicians in the time frame from 2015 to 2020. Specifically, this presentation will illustrate some of the results obtained by corpus linguistic techniques, with a focus on the occurrence of terms and the differences over time, places and people through statistical analyses using Sketch Engine and descriptive statistics