The Role of Language in the Climate Change Debate

This volume takes a distinctive look at the climate change debate, already widely studied across a number of disciplines, by exploring the myriad linguistic and discursive perspectives and approaches at play in the climate change debate as represented in a variety of genres. The book focuses on key linguistic themes, including linguistic polyphony, lexical choices, metaphors, narration, and framing, and uses examples from diverse forms of media, including scientific documents, policy reports, op-eds, and blogs, to shed light on how information and knowledge on climate change can be represented, disseminated, and interpreted and in turn, how they can inform further discussion and debate. Featuring contributions from a global team of researchers and drawing on a broad array of linguistic approaches, this collection offers an extensive overview of the role of language in the climate change debate for graduate students, researchers, and scholars in applied linguistics, environmental communication, discourse analysis, political science, climatology, and media studies.

Kjersti Flottum is professor of French linguistics at the Department of foreign languages, University of Bergen. Her research fields are text and genre theory and discourse analysis, with a special focus on linguistic polyphony in scientific, political and climate change discourse as well as on narrative structures in climate change discourse. Flottum has headed several cross-disciplinary projects (KIAP, EURLING, LINGCLIM). She is co-author of the books ScaPoLine (2004) and Academic Voices (2006), and editor of Speaking to Europe (2013). She has published in international journals such as Journal of Pragmatics, Journal of Language and Politics, Language & Communication, Text & Talk, Climatic Change, Global Environmental Change, Nature Climate Change, and in Oxford Research Encyclopedias.