What is "climate change"? The negotiation of meaning in current discourse

In this paper will be investigated what is the actual meaning of climate change (Klimawandel). Since it is a problem of semiotic nature, Peirce's conception of the sign, especially the assignation of signifier to the signified, will be taken as a starting point. This is the fundamental principle of the pragmatic approach to meaning (negotiation of meaning). Language corpora and lexical feature maps (SOMs) are used to analyze the language context of climate change (Klimawandel). It will be examined how meaning is currently defined in dictionaries of the German language. Texts from politics, industry and science are analyzed to shed light on the process of negotiating of meaning in these contexts. This paper also aims to make a general contribution to the discussion on climate change