Corpus-Assisted Ecolinguistics

Robert Poole

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350138575
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Corpus-Assisted Ecolinguistics introduces and integrates key research concepts, principles and techniques in ecolinguistics and corpus-assisted discourse study, answering foundational questions for researchers new to the discipline and asserting the urgent need to expand its scope. Breaking new ground, the book analyzes under-explored environmental discourses that have a tangible impact on ecological wellbeing and sustainability by perpetuating harmful attitudes, practices and ideologies. Chapters present in-depth case studies, including an analysis of the evolving representations of wilderness, an eco-stylistic analysis of a popular novel, and an investigation of the use of humor in reports on animal escapes from slaughterhouses. The studies employ a range of corpus analysis techniques to show how ecological degradation and crisis have become normalized, and even trivialized, in popular discourse but also spaces where positive discourse practices are present. By applying tools from corpus linguistics to a diverse range of environmental discourses, this book makes a significant contribution to advancing the field of ecolinguistics.

1

An Introduction to Ecolinguistics and Corpus-Assisted Discourse Study

1.0 Introduction

This chapter briefly introduces ecolinguistics, corpus linguistics, corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS), and critical discourse studies (CDS) to provide the historical, theoretical, and methodological foundations for corpus-assisted ecolinguistics as pursued in the balance of this text. Though many of the concepts of this opening chapter are revisited more deeply in later chapters, the discussions here provide a necessary foundation to the multiple research traditions and approaches informing this text’s approach to corpus-assisted ecolinguistics. In closing, the chapter outlines the organization of the book and provides brief summaries of each chapter.

1.1 Defining Ecolinguistics

The word formation process which blends ecology and linguistics seems rather clear and transparent, yet defining and delimiting the resulting term has not been so easily achieved historically. An early definition of ecolinguistics established the field as one focused upon “the study of interactions between any given language and its environment” (Haugen, 1972/2001, p. 325). One may imagine a research enterprise reflective of this term, but it is quite likely the imagined research agenda would not capture the diversity of methods, approaches, and domains of application this definition has stimulated. Ecolinguistics, as pursued by this text, emerges from this early definition from Einar Haugen but more closely aligns with a research tradition which explores how language mediates and shapes how people think about and engage with physical spaces, nonhuman animals, and the environment generally. Ecolinguistics, in this tradition, thus, takes the position that “perceptions of nature are mediated through language and that in turn such perceptions and lifestyles feed back into the structure of discourse” (Mühlhäusler, 2003, p. 12). While Haugen’s aforementioned conceptualization motivates “deeper reflections on the theories of language inspired by a holistic paradigm of ecology,” this second discourse-focused strand of ecolinguistics applies a range of discourse analytic methods to the analysis of language use of ecological relevance and importance (Bang & Trampe, 2014). Most frequently in this discourse analytic tradition, at times referred to as ecological discourse analysis (EDA), researchers analyze features of the language system which produce an “unecological fragmentation” between humans and the environment (Fill & Mühlhäusler, 2001, p. 6). Essentially, ecolinguistics interrogates the “role of language in the life-sustaining interactions of humans, other species, and the physical environment” (International Ecolinguistics Association, 2019).

The underlying theoretical rationale informing research in the field aligns with a post-structuralist, constructivist notion that views language as mediating how we think and perceive, and therefore how we act and engage with/in the world. Though this rationale is shared with much critical discourse analytic work across the social sciences, ecolinguistics is unique for its particular focus on and critique of “forms of language that contribute to ecological destruction” (Stibbe, 2015, p. 1). While this may seem rather deterministic to some, ecolinguists believe language indeed has a contributing role to our ecological crisis. Such a theoretical orientation conflicts with structuralist beliefs of language that see the language system as simply encoding and reflecting an objective, preexisting reality. Ecolinguists view such an orientation to language and its use as flawed and insufficient, instead seeing language from a Hallidayan perspective as a complex semiotic system for construing reality and worldviews, not a system for capturing an external, objective truth. For ecolinguistics, language is constitutive for it both reflects and builds reality.

To exemplify this constitutive view of language use with samples from modern prevailing discourse is not particularly challenging as many such instances are present in mainstream communication. Though the previous discussion may feel esoteric, its essential thesis is reflected in evolving language use throughout society. For example, a sort of language engineering has occurred that has de-gendered such titles as chairman and policeman for the more inclusive chairperson and police officer. That change both reflects reality as more women occupy such positions, but it also builds such a reality by producing a cognitive space that views gender equality as preferable and such positions as achievable occupational goals for all genders. Similarly, the historically dominant use of masculine pronouns in science and academic writing has essentially disappeared in these respective discourse communities over the past few decades. There is also the campaign forwarded by Facebook executive Cheryl Sandberg to stop people from describing women and girls as bossy for actions their male counterparts are deemed assertive and praised for leadership. A view that language is an arbitrary system for encoding a preexisting reality would seemingly not object to the ascription of bossy, the gendering of titles, etc. In contrast, the critical discourse analyst argues that the ascription of the label reflects attitudes and beliefs about gender roles shared in a community or culture, but, and most profoundly, it normalizes and perpetuates such systems, thus reconstituting the system for years to come. In addition to critiquing the linguistic practice under inquiry, much critical discourse analysis seeks to motivate awareness of and ultimately change linguistic practices that normalize and perpetuate marginalization, exploitation, and inequality, a mission that is shared by ecolinguistics but extended to the physical environment and nonhuman species as well.

Though the aforementioned examples are not of immediate ecological relevance, this book explores similar linguistic practices that influence our conceptualization of and actions toward the environment. Ecolinguistics extends the scope of inquiry to discourses of nonhuman animals, depictions of physical spaces, representations of the climate crisis, and beyond. Through such work, ecolinguistics aims to challenge language patterns and practices that (re)produce attitudes, beliefs, identities, and ideologies which contribute to ecological destruction or identify and promote those practices that contribute to well-being and sustainability (Stibbe, 2015).

1.2 A Brief History of Ecolinguistics

It is worthwhile to look back at the field’s origins in the nineteenth century through its development to the present. In a field so intimately focused on emergence and interconnection, a general orientation to the field’s philosophical, scientific, and theoretical genesis seems quite necessary. Undoubtedly, some may tell a different history with different key figures and alternative points along their timeline, and readers are encouraged to review other histories of the field written previously (e.g., do Couto, 2014; LeVasseur, 2015; Mühlhäusler, 2003; Steffensen & Fill, 2014). This brief review begins with the brothers Alexander von Humboldt and Wilhelm von Humboldt before moving to Charles Darwin and Ernst Haeckel. In the nineteenth century, few people were likely as well known around the world as Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Darwin, and Ernst Haeckel (Wulf, 2015). While we know them for their immense scientific contributions, their work underpins the theoretical and philosophical foundation of language ecology and ecolinguistics. From these figures of the nineteenth century, this history moves more rapidly through a series of key figures of the twentieth century before exploring more recent work central to the field today.

In 1807, the German naturalist, geographer, and explorer Alexander von Humboldt published Essays on the Geography of Plants in which he depicted in the sketch Ein Naturgemälde der Anden the interconnectivity and interrelatedness of all elements of the physical world. His transformational work is generally unknown in the modern world, but his radical rethinking of nature continues to exert immense influence on science and modern thought (Wulf, 2015). Though he did not coin the term ecology—the coinage is attributed to Ernst Haeckel—Alexander von Humboldt’s views on the unity and interconnectedness of nature are the theoretical and philosophical genesis of ecology. Some may point to the inspirational image of The Blue Marble captured from the window of Apollo 17 for awakening modern ecological consciousness, but Humbolt’s Naturgemälde from well over 100 years before the iconic Blue Marble image was the first to assert and inspire the conceptualization of an interconnected ecological system. In his work, he asserted a comprehensive, dynamic, and holistic view of nature as a complex and interactive system, a view which would later influence renowned naturalists such as John Muir, Henry David Thoreau, and George Perkins Marsh (Wulf, 2015).

Amazingly, Alexander von Humboldt was only one member of his family whose intellectual work would contribute to ecology. While Alexander expanded our conceptualization of the interconnectedness of the physical world, it was his brother, Wilhelm von Humboldt, who began to bridge ecological thinking with linguistic theory and analysis. Serving as an important precursor to the more well-known work of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf, Wilhelm von Humboldt asserted that language must be more carefully studied in relation to context and culture for he argued variations in grammar reflects different views of reality (Swan, 2011; Wulf, 2015). Quite radical at the time, Wilhelm claimed that every language encodes a particular worldview and that language is not simply a tool for communication but that it actually functions to shape thought (Wulf, 2015). As captured in Andrea Wulf’s biography of Alexander, the terminology used by the two brothers for describing nature and language were often the same, and they undoubtedly influenced each other’s thinking.

Though Alexander von Humboldt’s work was undeniably influential and would shape and inform the thinking of many of the great environmental writers of the next hundred years, the term oecology, which evolved to ecology, was first used by the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel in the 1866 monograph Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (General Morphology of Organisms) (Kingsland, 1991, p. 1) in an attempt to capture and explain the complex relationships Charles Darwin elaborated in his 1859 On the Origin of Species (from Macintosh, 1985, cited by Kingsland, 1991, p. 1). This coinage and his work helped launch Ecology as a science made distinct through its “application of experimental and mathematical methods to the analysis of organism-environment relations, community structure and succession, and population dynamics” (Kingsland, 1991, p. 2). In the decades following Darwin’s classic text and Haeckel’s elaboration, naturalists, botanists, and zoologists took a more “rigorous approach to natural history” (p. 2) and at the turn of the twentieth century, the domain of Ecology was described as a “dynamic, experimental approach to the study of adaptation, community succession, and population interactions” (Kingsland, 1991, p. 2). Increasingly, an ecology-driven approach was adopted by prominent naturalists in the United States who rejected more traditional, descriptive methods for the more quantitative and theoretical principles offered by the emerging science. In this time, Stephen Forbes published “The Lake as Microcosm” (1887), a seminal article that remains a frequently cited piece in ecology. In this piece, Forbes developed the conceptualization of the complex, interrelated interactions present within an ecosystem.

While scholars often apply metaphors, approaches, and theories from other fields and shape and transform them in a manner useful and insightful for their own pursuits, few seem to be so apt to borrow as language studies and linguistics. Ecology is one such example. Linguists in the early 1900s were beginning to extrapolate principles of ecology for language theory as the complexity of language and its interrelationship with people, places, culture, and thought was increasingly observed. The first applications of ecology to language through works of Franz Boaz, Edward Sapir, Benjamin Lee Whorf, and Charles and Florence Voegelin would emerge in the southwest of the United States.

While the roots of Ecology are undoubtedly European in origin, Sapir’s work in the American southwest is often regarded as foundational in the area of language ecology. In Sapir’s well-known and ultimately quite controversial essay “Language and Environment” (1912/2001), he cautioned against producing a view of human culture and human life in which all differentiation may be allocated to environmental influences. Indeed, he stated that deterministic arguments that explain features of human culture through direct correlation to physical environment “rest on fallacy” (1912/2001, p. 13). Nonetheless, he did define language as “a complex of symbols reflecting the whole physical and social background in which a group is placed” (1912/2001, p. 14) and that language is indeed “influenced by the environmental background of its speakers” (1912/2001, p. 14). In perhaps the most profound yet critiqued statement of the essay, Sapir wrote:

The complete vocabulary of a language may indeed be looked upon as a complex inventory of all the ideas, interests, and occupations that take up the attention of the community, and were such a complete thesaurus of the language of a given tribe at our disposal, we might to a large extent infer the character of the physical environment and the characteristics of the culture of the people making use of it.

(1912/2001, p. 14)

While the strong form of this statement attracted critics, it seems that in recent years this view has re-emerged and its message has become less controversial. The evidence of his influence on language ecology remains, and in perhaps the most comprehensive volume of essays on ecolinguistics, The Ecolinguistics Reader: Language, Ecology, and Environment (Fill & Mühlhäusler, 2001), Sapir’s essay is the first included in the text.

The American southwest and languages of indigenous peoples of North America would also influence the work of C.F. and F.M. Voegelin and their collaboration with Noel Shutz Jr. (1967). Their publication in Dell Hymes’ “Studies in Southwestern Ethnolinguistics” (1967) is of importance to the history of language ecology for its description of the languages used within a geographical area from a sociocultural perspective. This work moved beyond census-like reporting of number of speakers of a given language, a practice quite common of the period, to a much more in-depth analysis of the functional interactions between languages within an area and the complexity of interactions between the language varieties present. This sometimes overlooked precursor to the frequently cited work of Einar Haugen has an important place in the development of language ecology.

As do Couto writes in his history of the field, the concept of ecology of language was first produced in a 1970 talk by Einar Haugen at the Center of Applied Linguistics. Haugen coined the term ecolinguistics (do Couto, 2014) and his 1972 text The Ecology of Language is frequently marked as the beginning of modern ecological approaches to language studies. In his text, Haugen (1972/2001) defined language ecology as “the study of interactions between any given language and its environment” (p. 325) and critiques biological, instrumental, and structural metaphors, asserting the ecology metaphor presents a more dynamic conceptualization of language and its interrelationship with the environments in which it exists. Within an ecological approach, Haugen charges that one must explain the context of the language but also report the effect the language has on the context. Thus, in Haugen’s view, language ecology is characterized by reciprocity and interaction. Haugen also critiques many studies in language description for offering brief, and as he states, “perfunctory” (1972/2001, p. 324) information on the ecological environment in which languages are situated. He claimed the basic comments do little to actually explain the status and function of a language and argued that linguists should pay more attention to explaining much more comprehensively the ecology of a language. Though we noted Haeckel earns credit for the coinage of ecology, it appears Haugen receives the honor for ecolinguistics.

It is worth contextualizing briefly the context in which Haugen’s ecology of language emerged. Only a few years earlier, Rachel Carson had captivated readers with her book Silent Spring (1962). Though not typically tethered to discussions of language and ecology, her text is in many ways an exemplar demonstration of how language use can reconfigure dominant conceptualizations of the environment while directing and inspiring readers to live more sustainable lives. Her work opened new spaces in the minds of her community of readers to think differently about the places they inhabit through her ominous portrayal of a spring without birdsong. Additionally, it does not seem incidental that only several years following the publication of her book that the United States held its first Earth Day and Europe celebrated its first Conservation Day. Indeed, many mark the publication of Silent Spring in 1962 as the beginning of the modern environmentalist movement in North America. And it was in this context in which Haugen’s tethering of ecology and language emerged and which various research trajectories informed by ecological thinking soon sprang forth.

In the years following Haugen’s work, scholars applied and extended Haugen’s conceptualization of language and ecology to domains from linguistic diversity, language contact, to language planning and policy. However, most informing of the current tradition in ecolinguistics to investigate the role of language in normalizing and thereby perpetuating ecological degradation is work that questions whether linguistic patterns and features function within discourse to produce unsustainable relationships between humans and the environment (Steffensen & Fill, 2014). This discourse analytic strand of ecolinguistics is often tracked to M.A.K. Halliday’s 1990 talk at the World Congress for the International Association of Applied Linguistics in Greece.

In his talk and subsequent publication of “New Ways of Meaning: The Challenge to Applied Linguistics,” Halliday discusses features embedded within the English language in what he calls the “cryptogrammic fourth level” (1990/2001, p. 193) that operates beyond our conscious attention and functions to influence how we perceive the world. Halliday’s argument asserted that “categories and concepts are construed by grammar, and thus, language is not an arbitrary system which represents and encodes pre-existing environmental realities” (p. 180). Thus, he forwards four features which construe the environment in ways he marks as unsustainable: (1) unbounded, non-count nouns present items as limitless, (2) the grammar of “good” as the grammar of “big” with grammar of “small” representing “bad,” (3) inanimate objects are prohibited agency, (4) personal pronouns permitted only for animate entities. For Halliday, language is “at the same time a part of reality, a shaper of reality, and a metaphor for reality” (p. 184). This eco-critical stance toward language use continues to be a productive research space in ecolinguistics today; the corpus-assisted work emerging from this tradition will be more fully detailed in the following chapter.

From Haugen in 1972 to Halliday in 1990, the next key point in the discipline’s emergence is The Ecolinguistics Reader: Language, Ecology & Environment in 2001—the edited volume included greater than twenty-five essays exploring the varied domains of language and ecology. Though the comprehensive collection reflected the breadth of the field and helped establish its standing, it also earned some criticism for its rather “broad notion of ecology” that would possibly “threaten a desirable unity of a field” (Gerbig, 2003, p. 93). While intellectually stimulating, variation in the research agenda was critiqued as a weakness for the emerging discipline. Such a multiplicity of research regimes has continued to be a source of critique for ecolinguistics, as some have felt that such diversity of application and approach has contributed to a lack of unity and coherence and an inability to create a unified mission amongst the community of scholars identifying as ecolinguists.

From 2001 to 2015, there were several noteworthy texts published in ecolinguistics, namely Language of Environment, Environment of Language (Mühlhäusler, 2003), Framing Discourse on the Environment: A Critical Discourse Approach (Alexander, 2009), and Animals Erase...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Plates
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 An Introduction to Ecolinguistics and Corpus-Assisted Discourse Study
• 2 Corpus-Assisted Ecolinguistics
• 3 A Corpus-Assisted Diachronic Analysis of Representations of Wilderness
• 4 Corpus-Assisted Ecolinguistics for Literary Texts: A Keyness Analysis of Richard Powers’ The Overstory
• 5 Roving Beasts and Bolting Bovines: Wordplay in the Reporting of Animal Escapes
• 6 Geographical Text Analysis for Corpus-Assisted Ecolinguistics
• 7 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint