“SUSTAINABILITY” IN ECOLINGUISTICS RESEARCH ARTICLES: A CORPUS-BASED ANALYSIS
Abstract
As a newly developed concept, ecolinguistics has been closely associated with language diversity and endangerment. However, the existence of critical discourse analysis (CDA) in the early ’90s triggered scholars to start questioning the role of discourse in affecting our planet’s sustainability. In 2014, Stibbe and Alexander proposed the term “ecological discourse analysis” (EDA) to emphasize the term ‘ecological’ as a paradigm instead a discourse type. Drawing upon the availability of research articles on ecolinguistics, this paper examines the lexeme “sustainability” and its collocation to conclude further how ecolinguistics locates sustainability in its discussion. Data were downloaded from the Scopus database by inserting the ‘ecolinguistics’ keyword and uploaded to Sketch Engine, an online corpus tool developed by Adam Kilgariff. To specify the analysis, this paper focused on finding the collocates of ‘sustainability’ and examined its context through concordance lines. Of the 42 research articles (514,011 tokens) analyzed, this paper found 132 ‘sustainability’ lexemes. The researcher further limited the collocation in the 3L-3R span of a minimum of 5 frequencies in the corpus and used logDice score to measure the co-occurring word in the given span. The analysis found that ‘sustainability’ is collocated, among others, with ‘planetary’ (9.56), ‘reports’ (9.56), ‘webpages’ (8.42), ‘corporate’ (7.96), ‘justice’ (7.95), ‘reporting’ (7.84), and ‘environmental’ (7.78). It is found that the issue of sustainability is not limited to environmental issues but is scattered in corporate discourses. The interwoven between sustainability and corporate discourse proves that the recent application of ecolinguistics has contributed to critical discourse studies that concern taken-for-granted discourse as an important factor affecting how we think, talk, and act toward the environment. Applying the corpus-based method helps the researcher conclude the role of ecolinguistics in empirically criticizing the issue of sustainability.
Keywords: corpus, discourse, ecolinguistics, research articlesFull Text:
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