FIGHTING TALK: The use of the conceptual metaphor CLIMATE CHANGE IS CONFLICT in the UK Houses of Parliament, 2015-2019

• Analyses on news media data in Conceptual Metaphor Theory have highlighted several frequent metaphors used to understand climate change including CLIMATE CHANGE IS CONFLICT. This article analyses the frequency of that conceptual metaphor in a corpus of UK parliamentary debates on climate change. The language of political decision-makers is important to scrutinise because this group have the social and legislative power needed to deal with the issue. Our analysis shows the conceptual metaphor itself, and all three of its most frequent linguistic realisations (‘challenge,’ ‘impact,’ ‘tackle’), increased in use between 2015 and 2019. Additionally, three notable semantic and pragmatic trends were observed: first, apparently little recognition of human behaviour as a cause of climate change; second, a narrative of Us/People vs Climate Change; and third, that political decision-makers are taking climate change increasingly seriously. Some of these findings challenge existing knowledge and thus beg questions that require future research efforts.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Jämförande språkvetenskap och allmän lingvistik (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- General Language Studies and Linguistics (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

climate change

political discourse

Conceptual Metaphor Theory

CLIMATE CHANGE IS CONFLICT

corpus linguistics

discourse analysis

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

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