The evolution of climate change narratives: analysis of metaphor scenarios in four genres

This research demonstrates the evolution of climate change metaphors in a corpus composed of articles from four genres: British newspapers, international scientific journals, environmentalist communication in the UK, and British political speeches. This comparison establishes how metaphors originating in scientific discourse are adapted in different types of discourse about climate change. We investigate such adaptations to determine if the interpretation of metaphors differs in the four genres. To build a conducive corpus, we use the Nexis database for the analysis of British newspapers, the Web of Science archives for the analysis of scientific articles, the Friends of the Earth press releases for the analysis of environmental communication, and the BritishPoliticalSpeech database for the analysis of political speeches. We identify metaphors such as greenhouse effect, carbon footprint, Mother Nature, climate forcing, discussed in existing literature (e.g., Koteyko 2010; Nerlich 2010; Nerlish & Hellsten 2014; Atanasova & Koteyko 2017; Flusberg, Matlock & Thibodeau 2017; Deignan, Semino & Paul 2019). We supplement our research by consulting the British National Corpus to establish a semantic link between different occurrences and how they occur in different narratives (Bamberg & Andrews 2004). Additionally, we manually analyse a sample of our corpus to observe metaphors not previously discussed in existing literature. These steps led us to focus on 8 main narratives associated with 8 metaphorical domains FAMILY/ HOME, a RELIGION, a DAMAGED BODY, a DAMAGED CONTAINER, a TRANSFORMED HOUSE, a DANGEROUS TRACE, a CRASHING TRANSPORT, and a CONFLICT. These narratives are regrouped into four general perspectives on climate change observed in the four genres: the eulogy of nature, the deterioration of nature, the materialisation of pollution, and the doom prediction. The distribution patterns of scenarios in each genre shows that relevant metaphorical descriptions are specific to each genre and climate change events which have had an impact on communication