Scarica Ecolinguistics Arran Stibbe sintesi e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Lingua Inglese solo su Docsity! CHAPTER 1: Introduction Ecolinguistics can play a role in the reinvention of society along more ecological lines by revealing and challenging the stories we live by. The stories we live by are structures in the minds of individuals (cognition) or across the minds of multiple individuals in society (social cognition) that influence how we think, talk and act. Ecolinguistics analyses language to reveal the stories we live by, judges those stories from an ecological perspective, resists damaging stories, and contributes to the search for new stories to live by. Ecological philosophy, or ecosophy, is a framework of values – a vision of ideal relationships of humans, other species, and the physical environment. Types of stories Ideologies, framings, metaphors, evaluations, identities, convictions, erasure, and salience Examples: The ‘prosperity story’ which promotes worship of material acquisition and money; the ‘biblical story’ which focuses on the afterlife rather than the world around us; the ‘security story’ which builds up the military and police to protect relationships of domination; and the ‘secular meaning story’ which reduces life to matter and mechanism (Korten 2006). ◆ The most dangerous story we live by is ‘the story of human centrality, of a species destined to be lord of all it surveys, unconfined by the limits that apply to other, lesser creatures.’ (Kingsnorth and Hine 2009) The current stories we live by are not working, since society is becoming increasingly unequal and ecologically unsustainable. The ‘linguistics’ of ecolinguistics refers to: any linguistic framework or tool that can analyse language to reveal the underlying stories that we live by. Ambivalent story: A story which only partially accords with the ecosophy of the analyst (e.g., it is seen as having mixed benefits and drawbacks in encouraging people to protect the ecosystems that life depends on). Beneficial story: A story which accords with the ecosophy of the analyst (e.g., it is seen as encouraging people to protect the ecosystems that life depends on). Destructive story: A story which opposes or contradicts the ecosophy of the analyst (e.g., it is seen as encouraging people to destroy the ecosystems that life depends on). Ecolinguistics: An umbrella term for approaches that investigate language and various kinds of interaction. The form of ecolinguistics described in this course analyses language to reveal the stories-we-live-by, judges those stories according to an ecosophy, resists stories which oppose the ecosophy, and contributes to the search for new stories to live by. Ecosophy: An ecological philosophy, i.e., a normative set of principles and assumptions about relationships among humans, other forms of life and the physical environment. Analysts use their own ecosophy to judge the stories that they reveal through linguistic analysis. Story: A cognitive structure in the minds of individuals which influences how they perceive the world. Types of stories include ideologies, metaphors, framings, identities, evaluations, convictions, erasure, and salience. Story-we-live-by: A story in the minds of multiple individuals across a culture. Ecolinguistics consists of questioning the stories that underpin our current unsustainable civilization, exposing those stories that are clearly not working, that are leading to ecological destruction and social injustice, and finding new stories that work better in the conditions of the world that we face. These are not stories in the traditional sense of a narrative, however, but rather discourses, frames, metaphors and, in general, clusters of linguistic features that come together to covey particular worldviews. Some general characteristics of an ecolinguistic approach to discourse analysis are described below: a) The focus is on discourses that have a significant impact not only on how people treat other people but also how they treat the larger ecological systems that life depends on. b) The discourses are analysed by showing how clusters of linguistic features come together to form particular worldviews or ‘cultural codes’. A cultural code is ‘a compact package of shared values, norms, ethos, and social beliefs… [which] constructs and reflect the community’s “common sense”’. An example is the pervasive code that sees unlimited economic growth as both a possible and a desirable goal for human societies. c) The criteria that worldviews are judged by are derived from an explicit or implicit ecological philosophy (or ecosophy). Both a scientific and an ethical framework. d) The study aims to expose and draw attention to discourses which appear to be ecologically destructive or alternatively to seek out and promote discourses which could potentially help protect and preserve the conditions that support life. e) The study is aimed towards practical application through raising awareness of the role of language in ecological destruction or protection, informing policy, informing educational development, or providing ideas that can be drawn on in redesigning existing texts or producing new texts in the future. One of the stories that we live by, which is repeated endlessly in the press, is that high sales of material goods at Christmas are good, while low sales are bad. In terms of ecology, it might be better if people enjoyed their Christmas by spending time with friends and family, going outside into nature, helping others, or learning new skills, rather than opening a huge pile of presents. Ex. LOW RETAIL SALES ARE BAD. Ecolinguistics firstly uses linguistic analysis to reveal the underlying stories behind texts, then judges those stories from an ecological perspective. Whether a story is considered ‘destructive’ or ‘beneficial’ depends on the analyst’s ecological philosophy, or ecosophy. An ecosophy is a values framework, of the kind used in all critical analysis of texts, but it considers not just humans but also other species and the physical environment. As an example, a simple ecosophy might be that all forms of life are valuable and deserve respect, including humans, other animals, plants, and forests. The ecosophy is then used to judge the stories against. Intrinsic values: Where value is placed on goals such as alleviating poverty, contributing to the wellbeing of others, protecting the environment, or other altruistic goals which, in themselves, contribute to the common good. In other words, the goals are an ethical end in themselves. The discourse of the pork industry can be characterised as scientific and technical. There are therefore no explicit insults: pigs are never officially described as ignorant, selfish, greedy, nasty, or filthy. Yet it is possible to insert hidden ideological assumptions which none-the-less construct pigs in a negative way. Pigs have been linguistically re-conceptualised on a fundamental level, starting with a redefinition of the concept of their 'health': Quote 1) Health is the condition of an animal with regard to the performance of its vital functions. The vital functions of the pig are reproduction and growth. Usually, 'vital functions' refer to those bodily functions upon which life depends, such as digestion or the circulation of blood. However, in the redefinition, the bodily functions of the pigs are not vital to the individual animal but to the 'pork production enterprise'. This metaphorically constructs the enterprise as a huge animate being whose life depends on making a profit, with pigs rendered collectively vital but individually dispensable cells making up this larger being. Disease is defined in similar terms: 'Disease is a major risk to farm sustainability, thus protection of herd health is a top priority'. Note that 'health' has been replaced by the term 'herd health', leading to a situation where 'Verbally subsumed into the flock or herd, nonhumans disappear as individuals'. And when pigs disappear as individuals, their individual health problems also disappear from official consideration. Health is measured solely in terms of ability to perform the desired function, allowing genuine health problems which do not conflict with the function to be ignored. Pigs are only 'actually' ill when their health problems have a financial impact. The death of pigs due to the diseases and injuries associated with intensive farming is rendered not as a tragedy, but as a purely economic consideration through the phrase 'death loss'. The use of the expression 'death loss' avoids mentioning who died. The use of the pronoun 'it' is perhaps not accidental since it makes the piglet seem more like an object than a baby, making it easier to kill him or her. Pigs are often objectified by the pronoun 'it'. Another way of objectifying pigs is through the use of the metaphor 'pig as a machine'. Pigs are presented as resources which are 'produced', have 'salvage value' and appear in lists with other kinds of resources, e.g., 'efficient flow of feed, hogs and waste'. The distinction between living animals and meat products becomes blurred. Traditional Japanese nature poets can be seen as a group with a very different ideology about animals from the modern intensive farming industry. Are they represented as agents (i.e., doing things in the world), as sensers (thinking, and feeling) or more passively as affected participants (i.e., having something done to them). The discourse of neoclassical economics has been criticised for representing humans as fundamentally selfish, without any attempt to imagine or encourage a more generous, altruistic side to our character. Economics discourse has also been criticised for the ideology that economic growth is the main goal of society, despite the impact of growth on the environment. CHAPTER 3: Framings Framings are stories about a specific area of life that make use of small packets of general knowledge called frames. Climate change could be framed as an environmental issue, a security threat, a problem, or a predicament, and in each case how we think about climate change is different. Target Domain: climate change Source Frame: security threat Source Frame: violence Source Frame: business Source Frame: problem Source Frame: predicament Many things we’ve conceptualized as problems are actually predicaments. The difference is that a problem calls for a solution; the only question is whether one can be found and made to work, and once this is done, the problem is solved. A predicament, by contrast, has no solution. Faced with a predicament, people come up with responses. The different framings of climate change as a problem or a predicament lead to different ways of structuring the concept of climate change, and to different metaphorical entailments: Source Frame: Problem Target domain: Climate change Problem Climate change Solution Stop burning fossil fuels Structure: when the solution is found the problem disappears Entailment: if we stop burning fossil fuels then climate change will disappear Source Frame: Predicament Target domain: Climate change Predicament Climate change Response Close knit communities, adaptation Structure: whatever the response the predicament remains Entailment: even if we adapt and create stronger communities, we will still need to deal with the consequences of climate change Type of story 3. FRAMING What it is The use of a source frame (a packet of knowledge) to structure a target domain. What to look for Trigger words which bring a particular source frame to mind. The predicament frame, like the problem frame, has two elements: a ‘predicament’ and ‘a response’. The relationship between the elements is different though: people do the best they can to make the most of the situation they are in, but the predicament itself does not and cannot disappear. The framing NATURE IS A RESOURCE was given as an example of a ‘destructive’ framing since resources are valuable only if they are, or will be, consumed; they have no value if left to themselves in perpetuity. Another area of concern was the use of frames that evoke extrinsic values (money, status, rewards) in order to encourage people to behave responsibly towards other people and the environment. The chapter examined frame chaining in detail: the gradual process where a frame is modified or replaced again and again until the final result is something quite different from the original. The example examined was of the frame ‘development’, which was originally an altruistic attempt to relieve poverty in poor countries, but ended up as ‘sustained growth’, which is an attempt to maximise economic growth in rich countries by competing against poor ones. Entailment: A statement X entails another statement Y if Y is necessarily true when X is true (e.g., The corporation committed a crime entails that The corporation acted illegally.) Frame chaining: A process where a frame is repeatedly modified over time, resulting in a frame that is very different from the original. Frame displacement: A rhetorical move where one frame is sidelined and partially replaced by another one. Frame modification: The modification of an existing frame to create a new frame that carries some of the structure and characteristics of the old one but also some differences. The Transition movement began with Hopkins’ observation that knee-jerk responses to peak oil are devastating for climate change, and knee-jerk responses to climate change are simply impossible given the energy constraints imposed by peak oil. Transition arose, then, as a simultaneous response to climate change and peak oil, where communities massively reduce their dependence on fossil fuels through localisation, creating the kind of community that has low carbon emissions and can survive when oil prices are exorbitantly expensive in the future. The climate change and peak oil frames can be discarded and replaced with something new. The alternative framing that Hopkins puts forward is based on the discourse of economics: “Economic regeneration and social enterprise, rather than on promoting the issues of peak oil and climate change. We are promoting the concept of ‘localisation as economic development’ and about to start work on an ‘Economic Blueprint’ for the town.” Transition is an attempt to take the core ideas of resilience, localisation, decarbonisation, and community empowerment into the mainstream. It also promotes the idea of “localisation as economic development”. Gone are the words ‘peak oil’ and ‘climate change’, and in their place appears ‘economic development’. A thought-provoking report, Common Cause (2010), by the WWF in conjunction with social scientists, looked at the issue of how environmental ‘solutions’ are framed and the tension battle’ do not have the virus in their sights. Instead, their targets are the very same cattle, pigs and sheep who are being ‘attacked’ by the virus. The disease could, alternatively, have been dealt as a disease, and treated by caring for sick animals (who recover after a few weeks), vaccinating susceptible animals, and letting natural immunity take its course. But, because of the war metaphor, vets have taken on a new role in the crisis, killing rather than curing animals. So why is a war metaphor used? One reason is that war provides a means for the government to appease the farming lobby by placing themselves in the position of ally and focusing attention on a common foe. The reason farmers support the war metaphor is that they want the disease stopped before it arrives on their farms and causes reduced productivity and inconvenience in terms of looking after sick animals. And they want it stopped fast, avoiding vaccination ‘at all costs’, so that they can sell their meat abroad at premium prices. War metaphors justify taking drastic action to achieve these financial goals. The military embody and entrench the war metaphor. Notice that the ‘innocent victims’ here are not the animals, but the ‘farming families’. BBC says, ‘Farmers are the obvious victims of the outbreak of foot-and-mouth’, it is farmers, rather than animals, who are presented as victims. The victim is the farmer, the villain is the virus, and the hero is the government. Animals are not structured as victims in this scenario because the army cannot be ordered to kill ‘innocent victims’. Animals have become the targets of the killings. There are some attempts to portray animals as the agents of the virus, but these attempts are half hearted. This leaves animals with no role within the war metaphor. Instead of ‘killing animals’, a variety of euphemistic metaphors are used. The BBC talks about fields being ‘cleared’, while in the Times, animals are ‘lost’. In one article in the Farmer’s Guardian animals are ‘taken out’, ‘eliminated’, ‘removed’, and ‘disappear’. All of these ways of taking animals out of the picture hide the fact that within the metaphor of war animals are implicitly being made to play the role of enemy soldier. The second major way that the disease is conceptualised is through the metaphor of fire. Foot- and-mouth is, according to the Times, ‘the forest fire of diseases’, which is ‘raging out of control’. This justifies killing any animals who have the disease. The forest fire metaphor also leads to, and justifies, the killing of healthy animals. In the forest fire metaphor, animals are taking the role of trees, with those ‘animals in the line of spread sacrificed’. Fighting fire with fire is the metaphor, but in reality, this means fighting a mild animal illness with mass slaughter. The fire metaphor also allows the government, in the form of the agriculture minister, to claim that foot-and-mouth has been ‘contained’ and is ‘under control’ in the run up to an election. Foot-and-mouth disease is a mild, non-fatal illness. However, through ideological metaphors dispersed through the media the illness is constructed as a deadly virus which must be fought and stamped out, in all circumstances and at any cost. As this leads to the immediate killing of any animal who has the disease, ironically, the cognitive structuring itself converts a relatively harmless illness into a truly deadly disease. CHAPTER 5: Evaluations The term evaluations is used in this course to mean stories in people’s minds about whether a particular area of life is good or bad. Cognitive evaluations are associations that we have in memory, e.g., that honesty is good and lying is bad. When these stories are widespread across a culture then they are cultural evaluations – stories about what is good or bad that have become conventional. There are countless cultural evaluations that are built into common ways of talking about areas of social life, such as ECONOMIC GROWTH IS GOOD, RETAIL SALES ARE GOOD, INCREASED PROFITS ARE GOOD, FAST IS GOOD and CONVENIENCE IS GOOD. It becomes habitual to welcome the ‘good news’ that Christmas sales are high, without considering the cost to the environment or the problems of burgeoning personal debt; or to welcome the ‘good news’ that the profits of an ecologically destructive and exploitative corporation have risen. The appraisal patterns in texts arise from and promote underlying evaluations in people’s minds, which are stories about whether a particular area of life is good or bad. When the same appraisal pattern appears every day in countless texts that are repeated across a society, then this is evidence of a cultural evaluation, a pervasive way that something is thought of within a society. The key cultural evaluation that was examined in this chapter was ECONOMIC GROWTH IS GOOD, which is problematic since economic growth does not necessarily lead to a more even distribution of resources in society and is associated with ecological destruction. Appraisal patterns which represent economic growth positively are common, appearing extensively in economics textbooks, news reports, political discourse, and everyday conversation. Connotation: The associations that a word brings to mind in addition to its direct meaning, e.g., champagne connotes luxury. Type of story 5. EVALUATION What it is a story in people’s minds about whether an area of life is good or bad What to look for appraisal patterns, i.e., patterns of language which represent things positively or negatively Example: LOW SALES ARE BAD: appalling, slump, horror show, sobering, plagued, plunged, fears, disastrous, turmoil, dire, headache, suffered, hurt, deteriorating, disappointed, gloomy, worries, dismal, decline Example: SUNNY WEATHER IS GOOD: Fed up with wet summers and ice-cold winters? Take a break from the traditional British weather and get away for all-year-round sunshine holidays. Choose from the sun-soaked shores. You can enjoy great sunshine holidays at any time of year…for action packed sun holidays Example: RAIN IS GOOD (HAIKU): Joyful at night / tranquil during the day / spring rain Marked: In contrasting pairs like happy/unhappy or honest/dishonest the marked term is the one with the prefix (e.g., un- or dis-). In general, marked terms tend to have a more negative meaning than unmarked ones. Prosody: Semantic prosody is the positivity or negativity that words take on due to other words they are typically used with (e.g., commit has negative prosody because it tends to be collated with crime or murder). Unmarked: In contrasting pairs like happy/unhappy or honest/dishonest the unmarked term is the one without the prefix. In pairs such as high/low where there is no prefix, the unmarked term is the one used in a neutral question (e.g., ‘how high is the tower?’). In general, unmarked terms tend to have a more positive meaning than marked ones. This extract describes appraisal patterns and evaluations of the weather in two areas: travel agent websites and the weather forecast in the UK. It describes how a positive appraisal pattern for hot sunny weather can be ecologically destructive by encouraging people to be dissatisfied with their local area and fly off for holidays in the sun. The words ‘sun’ and ‘sunshine’ are splashed across British travel websites, even appearing directly in some of their names. Overlexicalization is when words appear abnormally often, giving a sense of over-persuasion that suggests something is problematic or contentious. The words ‘sun’ and ‘sunshine’ are collocated with positive adjectives like exotic, great, favourite, fantastic, perfect, ideal, popular, and world-famous. In contrast, the weather closer to home in Britain is represented negatively as: Fed up with wet summers and ice-cold winters? Take a break from the traditional British weather and get away to one of our destinations for all-year-round sunshine holidays. It also implies that wet and cold are the kind of things that the reader would be expected to be fed up with, planting this association in their minds. Other travel websites and newspapers represent the sunshine holiday as a form of ‘escape’, framing British weather negatively as a kind of prison. The Saga travel website frames British weather negatively as a disease. By contrast, the sunshine holiday is framed as the cure. Using a number of linguistic devices such as framing, collocation, contrast, and presupposition, newspapers and travel agents are telling a strong story. The story is that sunshine is fantastically good whereas cold, rain, wet or cloudy weather is bad. The intention is to encourage the reader to feel dissatisfied with the place they live in and the diversity of constantly changing weather in that place, and purchase holidays in the sun. These holidays are ecologically destructive because of the fuel used in transport, the environmental impact of the hotels and the huge amount of shopping that tends to go with them. The story that sunny weather is good, and any other kind of weather is bad runs much deeper than that and goes to the heart of British culture. When strangers meet, they greet each other with ‘Lovely weather isn’t it!’ (meaning only that it’s hot and sunny) or ‘Terrible weather, isn’t it’ (meaning there’s even a hint of mist, rain, or cloud). It’s a frame that exists in the mind of many people across Britain. In this way, social constructions of gender - masculinity in this case - have the potential to encourage behaviours which damage ecosystems. The advertisements in lifestyle magazines encourage the reader to be dissatisfied with their current identity and seek out products to create a new story of a more perfect self. In Cosmopolitan magazine have been found a series of stories about women, including a) aging is bad and must be striven against or disguised, b) fat is bad, c) body hair is bad, d) natural body odour is bad while synthetic fragrance is good, e) not wearing makeup is bad f) change and transformation of the self is good. The environmental group Surfers Against Sewage works against this consumerism and promotes environmental awareness. CHAPTER 7: Convictions Convictions are not about whether something is objectively true, but whether we believe it to be so, and the degree of certainty that we have about this belief. Features to look for: • Calls to expert authority and the authority of consensus. • Quantifiers such as ‘some’ or ‘many’. • Hedges such as ‘X thinks’ or ‘X believes’. • Presuppositions which construct descriptions as taken-for-granted rather than open for discussion or at issue. • Word choice: particular words which have an inbuilt comment on facticity, like fact, belief, fantasy, lie. • Modality, which shows how committed a speaker or writer is to the claim being made. Modality is on a scale from low commitment (e.g., the use of the modals ‘might’ or ‘probably’) to high commitment (e.g., the adverb ‘certainly’ or an unhedged declaration ‘X is the case’) • Metaphor • The ‘repertoire of empiricism’ which represents facts as deriving directly from the evidence without human interpretation. There are a wide range of linguistic techniques that writers and speakers use to build up the facticity of their own arguments and undermine those of their opponents. These techniques include the use modals such as must, adverbs such as certainly, calls to authority, and the use of the repertoire of empiricism. The chapter examined texts from a wide range of areas including Type of story 7. CONVICTION What it is A story in people’s minds about whether a particular description is true, certain, uncertain, or false. What to look for Facticity patterns, i.e., linguistic patterns that represent a description as true, uncertain, or false nature writing, the nuclear power industry, environmental organisations, anti-environmental organisations, economics textbooks and lifestyle magazines. In all cases, the texts represent a particular description of reality along a spectrum from certain fact to absolute falsehood. In doing so they are attempting to influence the convictions of their readers. Facticity: The degree to which a description is presented as a certain and established truth (e.g. through the use of high modality, calls to authority, or the repertoire of empiricism). Modality: The level of certainty expressed by the speaker about the truth of a statement, typically through the use of modal auxiliaries (can, could, may, might, must, ought, shall, should, will, or would) or adverbs (probably, arguably). Presupposition: The representation of a proposition as an obvious, taken-for-granted, background fact about the world Repertoire of empiricism: Ways of writing which increase facticity by representing conclusions as being derived directly and impartially from data. This extract analyses the facticity patterns and underlying convictions in a brochure about climate change. The brochure is from the Canadian free market think tank, the Fraser Institute, and presents an argument for not taking action on climate change. The title of the brochure is Fact, not fiction: an introduction to climate change. The negation in the title ‘not fiction’ implies that there is a voice ‘out there’ which is providing inaccurate information, while the brochure will set the reader straight with accurate and true information. It is only in the very last sentence of the brochure that the reader finds out who this other voice belongs to - ‘the alarmists’. The expression ‘alarmist’ is just one of a wide range of expressions used in climate change debates which turn a particular kind of opinion on climate change into a particular identity. On one side there are climate change ‘alarmists’, ‘warmists’, ‘fundamentalists’ or ‘believers’; on the other are ‘deniers’, ‘sceptics’ or ‘contrarians’. The brochure, therefore, gives the ‘facts’, as against the ‘fiction’ and ‘rhetoric’ of the ‘alarmists’. The leaflet represents its descriptions with high facticity by drawing on the repertoire of empiricism. The ‘facts’ in the brochure are organised carefully in a way that does not explicitly deny the descriptions ‘climate change is occurring’ or ‘humans play a role in causing climate change’, but instead more subtly undermines their facticity by introducing uncertainty. There are three main ways that this is achieved. The first is through the use of modality. Low facticity: by attributing it only to ‘some’ and using the quoting verb ‘suggest’ to introduce doubts about its reliability. The inverted commas around “greenhouse gasses” also lower facticity if they are taken as questioning whether there are actually such things as greenhouse gasses. High facticity: through the expression ‘there is evidence’, which distances the description from the writer’s own individual agendas or biases. The lack of modals in ‘the sun’s energy output has intensified’. In this way the article appears to be giving a balanced account but gives higher facticity to a solar explanation over an anthropogenic one. The second technique consists of placing evidence which suggests climate change is occurring together with evidence which makes it seem as if it is not. The pattern across the brochure is that more evidence which suggests that global warming is not occurring is provided than evidence that it is. This again gives the impression of a balanced account, while undermining the certainty of the description ‘climate change is occurring’. The third technique that the brochure uses to undermine facticity is through calling on authoritative sources such as NASA. This is an interesting facticity pattern because the brochure positions itself as confidently putting forward the description that sea ice has decreased, which suggests that climate change is occurring. On the other hand, NASA is positioned as throwing doubt on that idea. In this way, the brochure cherry picks statements from authoritative sources which appear to undermine the facticity of ‘climate change is occurring’, while disregarding all the opposing evidence these authorities provide. Facticity is not worked up or undermined just for the sake of it, but to lead to some particular action. Clearly, the action is stopping policymakers from imposing environmental regulations. What to look for: O Calls to expert authority. O Quantifiers such as ‘some’ or ‘many’. O Hedges such as ‘X thinks’ or ‘X believes’ O Presuppositions, which construct descriptions as taken-for-granted O Words which have an inbuilt comment on facticity such as fact, belief, fantasy, lie O Modality, from highly certain (e.g., must) to highly uncertain (might) O Metaphor, e.g., representing something as a religion reduces its facticity O The ‘repertoire of empiricism’ which represents facts as deriving directly from the evidence without human interpretation, e.g., ‘measurements show that…’. New Nature Writing has an interesting mix of facticity patterns, where sometimes facticity is high because of a scientific view of the world, and sometimes facticity is high because of the certainly provided by direct personal experience. as ‘blog’ and ‘broadband’. Instead, erasure means that animals and plants are present in a text but in a distant and diminished form, remaining only as traces. The mildest form of erasure occurs when animals and plants are replaced by species names such as ‘oak’, ‘badger’, ‘halibut’, ‘trout and salmon’, or their movements are frozen in two dimensional, enframed photographs. Then there are more abstract representations when a hypernym replaces the species name – ‘birds and mammals’, ‘nursery grounds for fish’, ‘a loss of species’, ‘organisms...provide us with food’, and progressively more abstract until we get to ‘native flora and fauna’. And the complex and contested term ‘biodiversity’ used throughout the report is far, far up the scale of abstraction. These terms at least remain within the semantic domain of living beings, but when animals and plants find themselves as hyponyms of ‘our resources’, then they are part of a larger semantic domain, lumped together with physical resources such as oil, water or sand. Then there are representations which contain traces of animals and plants by mentioning the places where they live, but not the dwellers themselves: ‘living and physical environments’ and ‘environmental resources’ represent animals and plants as part of an all-encompassing environment surrounding humans, ecc. Moreover, animals and plants are erased when they are referred to metonymically by the function they are serving within an ecosystem: ‘pollinators’, ‘primary producers’, ‘dispersers’, or the slightly more vivid ‘pollinating insects’. These at least are count nouns, suggesting a multitude of individuals, but in the expressions ‘wood and non-woody biomass’, trees and plants are represented as mass nouns, as mere tonnages of stuff. Fish are erased as they take the place of a modifier in a noun phrase, for example ‘fish stocks’, ‘fish catches’. When fish are modifiers of other nouns, they have been pushed to the periphery, the sentence being about something else. And the erasure is taken even further with the expression ‘fisheries’, where the fish themselves remain in the morphology of the word but exist as just a trace within a large commercial operation. What to look for: • Hypernyms, e.g. birds, mammals, fish, species, organisms, flora, fauna • Abstractions, e.g. biodiversity, ecosystem • Metaphors, e.g. terrestrial resources, natural capital, harvesting chickens • Indirect Associations, e.g. living and physical environment, wetland habitat • Functionalisation, e.g. primary producers, dispersers, pollinating insects • Mass Nouns, e.g. biomass, wood, 27 tonnes of biomass imports • Grammatical Embedding, e.g. fish consumption, bird capture • Passivation, e.g. the farmers euthanized the piglets • Morphological Embedding, e.g. fisheries There are three main types of erasure: the void, where something of importance is not mentioned at all, the trace, where it is mentioned indirectly, and the mask, where it is described in a distorted way. Images can also cause erasure, for example by failing to represent a subject at all; representing the subject in a small size or in the corner of a frame; showing them as part of a large group rather than as an individual; looking down at the subject (which makes them seem powerless); representing them as blurred or partially concealed, representing them in a stylised or distorted way, or as inactive (i.e., not doing anything). CHAPTER 9: Salience Patterns of visual features like these come together in pictures to give prominence to particular entities in the picture. In the same way, patterns of linguistic features can come together to form salience patterns which represent particular participants prominently in a text. By analysing a range of linguistic features, including focus, vitality, levels of abstraction, transitivity, and metaphor, it is possible to reveal salience patterns which represent an area of life vividly and concretely. This chapter described re-minding as a way of bringing attention to an important area of life that has been commonly overlooked or erased. While re-minding is an explicit call for that area of life to be brought back into consideration, there are also ways of using language and images which make the area of life salient in the mind of the reader or viewer indirectly. Linguistically, this can be achieved through individualisation, personalisation, activated roles and the easily imaginable basic level categories. Paralinguistic ways of increasing salience include placing a subject in the centre of the frame, using close-up shots, having the subject’s eyes look out at the viewer, using a low camera angle to make the subject appear more powerful, and depicting the subjects engaged in doing things, feeling things, or sensing things rather than having things done to them. Careful observation of nature is a route towards understanding how natural systems work, and with this comes an understanding of sustainability and environmental protection. Bringing the ecosystems that support life back into consciousness is clearly a key goal of ecolinguistics, but not the only one. It is also important to give salience to the victims of ecological destruction, to future generations, and to the shadowlands where environments are destroyed, and people exploited by overconsumption in the richer areas of the world. Type of story 9. SALIENCE What it is A story that something is important or worthy of consideration What to look for Salience patterns, i.e., patterns of language which foreground an area of life Example: ANIMALS ARE IMPORTANT (PETA). Example: ANIMALS ARE IMPORTANT - Esther Woolfson Demand picture: A visual image where a participant is looking out at the viewer, as if demanding a relationship with them. Personalization: When a social actor is represented as a unique individual through being named or vividly described. Useful for investigating salience. Phenomenon: The participant that is seen, heard, felt or otherwise perceived as part of a mental process, e.g. in I saw the owl ‘the owl’ is the Phenomenon. Photorealism: A photorealistic image is one which looks as it normally would if an observer was viewing the phenomenon in real life. Senser: A participant in a clause who is thinking, feeling or sensing something. Shot size: In visual images, shot size is the size of a subject compared to the size of the frame. The larger the subject, the closer the shot, which can indicate a close relationship with the viewer. The reason for choosing the UK school of New Nature Writing is that what links works of this genre is an emphasis upon picking out the hidden detail in the everyday, to illuminate what is overlooked and in doing so, to see the interrelationships between the human and the non-human differently. The starting point is the representation of starlings. Starlings, like human migrants, can sometimes get a hard time in the tabloid press in the UK. The terms flock and swarm reduce the salience of individuals, representing the birds as a single mass, with the word invaded giving negative appraisal to this mass. Ester Woolfson counters this kind of representation by focusing on a single starling and giving him the highest possible salience by naming him. By describing the characteristics of an individual, rather than a generalised list of characteristics of a particular kind of bird, Woolfson is representing him as unique rather than replaceable. Naming of individual animals is rare in New Nature Writing, but the use of the pronouns he, she, his, and her for animals is common and gives them salience by representing them in a more personalised way than the pronoun it. The mental processes staring, watching, thinking and looking, with the animals as Sensers activates the animals, foregrounding them and giving them salience as conscious beings. Animals are also frequently activated by being represented as Actors of material processes, i.e., as involved in purposeful activity. By using syntax that represents the birds as Actors, Mabey is putting this into practice by vividly representing the autonomy and agendas of the birds. Abstract terms like mammal, reptile, fauna, and organism are sometimes used in New Nature Writing since it is a multi-voiced genre that frequently mixes scientific and personal observation. By giving salience to these animals and plants in their writing, the writers model a way of paying close attention to the natural world.