Climate Change Discourse In Contemporary Anglophone Literature: A Corpus-Assisted Ecocritical Study

Abstract

With a growing frequency, modern Anglophone literature now turns to the issue of environmental crisis by employing various narrative and linguistic resources. Although ecocriticism has been studying their thematic and ideological aspects of climate fiction, there are fewer studies that incorporate corpus linguistics to methodically analyze repeated discursive patterns. This research paper closes this methodological rift by adopting a mix between corpus-assisted interpretation and ecocritical interpretation. This paper will examine the linguistic construction of climate change in the modern Anglophone literature. It aims to find out what the prevailing patterns of lexical choice, metaphorical structures and language of evaluation attached to environmental crisis, and to determine what the patterns of analysis can or cannot do with ecological awareness and moral standing. The analysis of a corpus-assisted ecocritical approach is to compile a digital corpus of climate novel and environment-oriented literary texts published twenty-first-century that were selected to comply with the requirements of the study. It examines the frequency of key words, collocations, concordance line, and semantic prosody, with the help of corpus linguistic tools. Close reading supplements the quantitative results to figure out the way linguistic patterns introduce meaning to narratives, characterization, and ideological positioning. The analysis indicates repetitive groups based on catastrophe, temporality, responsibility and interconnection. Imminent threat and moral challenge The concept of climate change is often framed using metaphors of tipping point, contagion and loss. The modality patterns and evaluative language underline the problems of despair and agency, and the options of foreground collective responsibility are supported by changes in the use of the pronouns. The paper shows that corpus-mediated approaches make ecocritical analysis more robust through revealing patterned discourse patterns that are likely to be implicit in nature. It demonstrates the role of linguistic influence of the Anglophone literature in the formation of popular notions of climatic crisis that are involved into a larger cultural discourse of sustainability, ethics, and environmental future.