Framing Discourse on the Environment A Critical Discourse Approach [Hardcover]

In this study, Richard Alexander presents a series of original and empirically based case studies of the language and discourse involved in the discussion of environmental and ecological issues. Relying upon a variety of different text types and genres  including company websites, advertisements, press articles, speeches and lectures  Alexander interrogates how in the media, press, corporate and activist circles language is employed to argue for and propagate selected positions on the growing ecological crisis. For example, he asks: How are ecological and environmental concerns articulated in texts? What do we learn about ecological problems through texts from differing sources? What language features accompany ecological discourse in differing contexts and registers? Attention is especially directed at where this discourse comes into contact with business, economic and political concerns.

Chapter 1: Integrating the ecological issue: Some linguistic self-reflexions; Chapter 2: Ecological commitment in business: A computer-corpus-based critical discourse analysis; Chapter 3: The framing of ecology: On the relation between language and economics; Chapter 4: Everyone is talking about sustainable development. Can they all mean the same thing? Chapter 5: Wording the world: The 2000 BBC Reith Lectures as an index of ecological progress or regression?; Chapter 6: Shaping environmental discourse: The example of the 2000 BBC Reith Lectures; Chapter 7: Resisting imposed metaphors of value: Vandana Shivas role in supporting Third World agriculture; Chapter 8: Environmental Issues, Third World Agriculture and Multinationals: Who Pays the Price?; Chapter 9: The Language and Discourse of Power and Orwells Problem; Chapter 10: Some concluding remarks on institutional obfuscation and military disinformation and what can be done about it

Richard J. Alexander, Full Professor of English Business Communication at the Vienna Ul³A