CONSTRUCTION OF ENVIRONMENTAL DISCOURSE

Abstract

Eurobarometer surveys (Online 1) report that approximately 85% of EU citizens identify climate change as a grave issue and hold the European Union (59%), national governments (66%), and business and industry (58%) accountable. Thus, the present research aims at determining how public media constructs environmental discourse. The conceptual frame of the study is established by such seminal contributions pertaining to the field of ecolinguistics as Stibbe (2015) and the Ecological Discourse Analysis (EDA) paradigm (Ming, 2022). The study methodology involves the underlying principles of the Strategic Narrative (SN) analytical approach (Miskimmon et al., 2013), which helps identify the dominant narratives used by different stakeholders. Although the approach is predominantly used in political communication and communication studies, its principles and concepts may offer valuable insights into the construction and interpretation of environmental discourse through language use. The applied Proximization Theory (PT) (Cap, 2013) assists in determining how different actors are positioned, focusing on the spatial, temporal, and axiological dimensions of perceived proximity and/or distance. The theoretical approach proposed by the PT is used to examine the discursive strategies employed in the selected environmental discourse corpus. The data is processed by applying corpus-assisted discourse analysis to the research corpus, which comprises strategic narratives from the English-language online portal of the Latvian Public Media (LPM). The analysis reveals that introverted domestication narratives predominate and engage five distinct actor groups. Furthermore, based on these findings, this study proposes extending the PT framework to better accommodate the multi-actoral and multidirectional nature of environmental discourse.