Suchergebnisse

The issue of climate change has been one of the critical foci of political discourse worldwide (Wagner, 2023). Given that political debates and political discourse are quite often communicated on Social Networking Sites (SNSs), for instance, Facebook and X (Araújo & Prior, 2021), it appears highly relevant to tap into political actors' discourse on SNSs that addresses the issue of climate change. Guided by the importance of SNSs in political discourse on climate change, the present article introduces and discusses a study on how Rishi Sunak, the current prime minister of the United Kingdom (the UK), frames the issue of climate change on his official Facebook and X accounts. Specifically, the aim of the study was to identify the types of frames used in Sunak's climate change discourse in a corpus of his posts on Facebook and X. The corpus was collected and analysed in accordance with the methodology proposed and developed by Entman (2007). The results of the analysis revealed that Sunak's framing of climate change involved a pragmatic economy-oriented aspect, which was presented discursively by imparting it a personalised dimension that involved multimodality. In particular, it was discovered that Sunak frequently framed the issue of climate change via the frames Burden and Green Technology. The findings were discussed in conjunction with the prior research on framing in climate change discourse.

Abstract
The article introduces and discusses a computer-assisted study that seeks to shed light on the frequency and use of the central modal verbs (can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, will, would) in research article (further: RA) abstracts in applied linguistics published in the Inner and Outer Circles of English, respectively. The study is informed by the construal of the Circles of English that are comprised of the Inner Circle, where English is spoken as the mother tongue (for example, the United Kingdom), the Outer Circle, where it is used as a second language in the former British colonies (for instance, Hong Kong, Malaysia, etc.), and the Expanding Circle (e.g., Japan), where English is spoken and taught as a foreign language (Kachru 48). In the construal of the Circles of English, the Outer Circle is regarded as a heterogeneous sociolinguistic space with fluid boundaries (Higgins 615) that affects the frequency and use of the central modal verbs in a variety of textual genres (Lee and Collins 501). Against this background, the study aims at identifying and analysing the frequency of the central modal verbs in a corpus of RA abstracts in applied linguistics published by international peer reviewed journals associated with the Outer Circle (one journal published in Hong Kong and one in Malaysia, respectively) and the Inner Circle of English (one journal published in the United Kingdom). The results of the quantitative analysis of the corpus indicate that the most frequent modal verbs in the entire corpus are can and may, which function as hedging devices in the journals that are associated with the Outer and Inner Circles of English, respectively. These findings are discussed in the article through the prism of the construal of the Circles of English.

This article presents a qualitative study of conceptual metaphors identified in Twitter discourse involving Ukraine by the current British Foreign Secretary Phillip Hammond. The study further described in this article involves a corpus of Hammond's tweets associated with Ukraine, which is subsequently juxtaposed with Hammond's online articles and speeches involving Ukraine in order to elucidate whether or not there are Twitter-specific conceptual metaphors in Hammond's Twitter discourse associated with Ukraine. The results of the data analysis reveal that Hammond's short messages on Twitter, or tweets, associated with Ukraine are embedded in conceptual metaphors 'Ukraine's future EU Membership as a Journey', 'UK as a Nurturant Parent', 'EU as a Nurturant Parent', 'Country as a Friend Helping Ukraine' and 'Russia as the EU's OTHER'. Identical conceptual metaphors have been found in Hammond's online non-Twitter discourse involving Ukraine. These findings are further presented and discussed in the article.

This qualitative study is aimed at elucidating conceptual metaphors associated with renewable energy sources (further referred to as 'renewables') in Ukrainian prime ministers' (PMs) political discourse. The material derives from a corpus of Ukrainian PMs' political texts on renewables in Ukraine within the timeframe 2005-2014. The corpus is examined for the presence of conceptual metaphors pertaining to the topic of renewables. Data analysis indicates that from 2005 to 2013 conceptual metaphors involving renewables are embedded in the issues of Ukraine's adherence to the Kyoto Protocol, the EU directives on renewables, the monetary value of renewables and the role of renewables in Ukraine's energy security, thus instantiating the conceptual metaphors Renewables as Ukraine's European Choice, Renewables as a Path to the EU, Renewables as Money and Renewables as Independence respectively. However, the novel metaphor Renewables as Survival is identified in PM Yatsenjuk's political discourse in 2014. This metaphor is embedded in the context of another conceptual metaphor, Gas as a Weapon, which is present in political discourse involving Russian natural gas export to third countries. Data analysis indicates that the conceptual metaphors Renewables as Survival and Renewables as Independence are in a polyphonic relationship of synergy and contrast with Gas as a Weapon. ; publishedVersion

"The Syntax of Climate Change: Syntactic Means in the Construction of Greta Thunberg's Community Identity on Facebook. It is argued that the identity of an online community (e.g., a Facebook community) is manifested by linguistic devices, such as syntactic means (Androutsopoulos 2015; Blumenfeld-Jones 2022; Kapranov 2019). This contention is explored in the study that is further presented and discussed in the article. The study seeks to identify syntactic means, in particular dependent clauses, which are involved in the construction of Greta Thunberg's community identity on Facebook. Greta Thunberg, a famous climate change activist from Sweden, has a public account on Facebook that is followed by a substantial number of Facebook users, who, presumably, share her views on climate change, sustainability, and other environmental issues. It is assumed in the study that Greta Thunberg's status updates on her public Facebook account could be characterised by syntactic means that facilitate the construction of the climate activists' community identity. In order to verify the assumption, a corpus of Greta Thunberg's status updates on Facebook was collected and analysed by the software program L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer (Lu 2010). The computer-assisted analysis was supplemented by a manual procedure of identifying the types of dependent clauses in the corpus. The results of the corpus analysis revealed that Greta Thunberg's community construction on Facebook was facilitated by such syntactic means as dependent clauses, in particular non-finite, adverbial, and relative clauses. The findings were further discussed in the article through the lens of the construction of community identity. Keywords: climate change, dependent clauses, Facebook, Greta Thunberg, identity, online community, syntactic means "