What is “sustainable development”? A contrastive keyword analysis of tweets about climate change in Norway, France and Belgium
(2023) 18th International Pragmatics Conference — Location: Université Libre de Bruxelles (2023.July.9AD)
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- Abstract
- ‘Sustainable development’ is a crucial concept related to Climate Change that permeates a variety of discourses (Redclift 2006). Such a success has developed a vagueness in meaning that becomes evident when we observe its semasiological variation. As Krieg-Planque (2010) studied, depending on the user’s ideology or intention, the term can acquire different meanings. These meanings emerge in specific linguistic contexts, in the sense that the presence of particular words and expressions such as proper names or topoï (idem) surrounding the term contributes to varied meaning construals. Our study is part of a bigger, interdisciplinary, European project that focuses on the scientific understanding of obstacles and disincentives to climate change mitigation through social media discourse, among others. In this occasion, we analyze the multiword expressions referring to the concept ‘sustainable development’ in French (développement durable) and Norwegian (bærekraftig utvikling) in three self-collected corpora of tweets from the three participating countries (France, Belgium and Norway), dating from 2007 to 2021. The corpora are topically related to climate change and are automatically annotated with metadata such as date of the tweet and social segment of the Twitter account (population, media, politicians). The Belgian French corpus has 385 977 tweets, the French corpus has 529 099 tweets and the Norwegian has 445 338 tweets. For this paper, our goal is to analyze potential differences in the meaning of ‘sustainable development’ in the three countries, as a way to unravel the values related to it (Wierzbicka 1997). For that purpose, we compare the relevance of the term in each corpora (keyword analysis) and then we analyze the differences in meaning within climate change discourse in Twitter, based on the linguistic context (collocation analysis). When compared to general web corpora from Sketch Engine, the terms reach different positions in their respective lists of multiword keywords: 25th for the Norwegian corpus, 41st for the French and 100th for the Belgian French. The collocation analysis in Sketch Engine for the expression (in examples such as développement durable et environnement ‘sustainable development and environment’) reveals the presence of a varied list of nouns referring to economy in general (innovation, croissance ‘growth’) and a variety of sectors (énergie ‘energy’, sécurité ‘security), together with abstract notions such as paix ‘peace’ or égalité ‘equality’, among others. In the next steps, the list of collocates of the three corpora will be compared in detail (in terms of presence/absence of certain collocates, and their ranking). Then, assuming that frequency is a measure of salience, the most relatively frequent collocates in each language will be manually analyzed in context to reach a better understanding of the meanings of the term in each country.
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Pizarro Pedraza, A., Cougnon, L.-A., Gjerstad, O., & Flottum, K. (2023). What is “sustainable development”? A contrastive keyword analysis of tweets about climate change in Norway, France and Belgium. 18th International Pragmatics Conference, Université Libre de Bruxelles.