Abstract
This piece of research explores language use in a sample of unprecedentedly studied discourse which is that of climate change communication by influential Spanish politicians via Twitter. For that purpose, we created a specialized corpus composed of tweets tackling climate change that were posted by influential Spanish politicians during the past decade. Our aim was to reveal prominent linguistic patterns that are susceptible of conveying a specific worldview (i.e.: the wording of reality) of climate change to Twitter users. Our analysis started with keywords analysis in order to gather quantitative data about the lexical choices deployed in our corpus, then by means of qualitative analysis based on semantic classification of keywords and the examination of their concordances we were able to point out distinctive features of our corpus’ discourse. Our results have revealed the prevalence of specific linguistic patterns, metaphors and frames that contribute to create a narrative of climate change as a villain and the human race, specifically political leaders, as the saviour.
Similar content being viewed by others
Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.
Introduction
In 2001, Halliday demonstrated how linguistic analysis plays a crucial role in finding ‘the key’ to environmental problems (e.g.: pollution and climate). In his article (Halliday, 2001), he also encouraged researchers to uncover worldviews enclosed in the linguistic choices deployed in planning and policy-making. Since then, there has been an increasing academic interest in (critical) ecolinguistics as evidenced in the following chart extracted from Google N gram viewer (Fig. 1).
Frequency of the word “ecolinguistics” extracted from Google N gram Viewer, 2000 to 2019
Unfortunately, climate change communication in Spanish has not been getting equal scholarly attention. Previous studies on the construction of climate change perception in the Spanish media are scarce in quantity, in comparison with those carried out in other EU countries. It is no coincidence that Chávez (2013) and Hernández et al. (2016) pick the term “silence” to refer to poor media coverage of global warming or climate change in Spain.
Erviti and León (2017) performed a relatively recent review of the history of climate change communication in Spain since its beginnings in 1976 till the first couple of decades of the 21st century. Two of their conclusions are of special importance to the build-up of the current paper as they shed light on: (1) the lack of any academic coverage of climate change communication via social media platforms in Spain, and (2) the construction of climate change in the Spanish media as a ‘remote phenomenon (…) in contrast with economic problems’ and essentially as a ‘political issue’ (Erviti & León, 2017: 25). In what follows, we highlight the most relevant findings of previous academic studies concerning climate change communication in Spain.
Literature Review
Through their content analysis of Spanish newspapers’ pieces covering the issue of climate change during 2005/2006 and 2011, Fernández-Reyes et al. (2015) revealed that pieces featuring “climate change”, “global warming” or “greenhouse effect” usually increase around UN Climate Change Conferences (COP). However, they also detected an inversely proportional relationship between publishing about climate change and the increased awareness and/or certainty about its consequences among the public. Thus, their findings suggest a possible manipulation of media coverage of climate change in order to shift the public’s attention away from the issue (Fernández-Reyes et al., 2015: 136).
Similar conclusions and recommendations can be found in the few academic studies performed before 2011.Footnote 1 For instance, Fernández-Reyes (2010: 12) highlighted the importance of digital communication about global warming as an alternative to the controlled discourse of mass-media productions which were termed by “oligopolios mediáticos/media oligopoly”.
In fact, the majority of academic production on the Spanish worldview of climate change belongs to the social sciences domain as “[r]esearch has primarily focused on public perception and media coverage of climate change” (Erviti & León, 2017: 2). Only a couple of studies authored by Castilla et al. (2013) and Fernández-Vázquez and Sancho-Rodríguez (2020) were found to tackle prevalent frames in climate change discourse in printed media, in Spain. This later piece of research stands out as the first Spanish academic work applying critical discourse analysis to the study of Spanish global corporates’ discourse about climate change. The paper demonstrates the prevalence of the technology frame as the solution to mitigate the effects of climate change in IBEX 35 Spanish corporates’ discourse, as Fernández-Vázquez and Sancho-Rodríguez (2020: 12) explicitly state that: “in the IBEX 35 narratives the focus is on reducing the worst effects of climate change, but without taking any extreme action that could involve a variation in current developmental models”.
Therefore, this paper of exploratory-descriptive approach aims to fill current gap in climate change construction and portrayal via social media platforms in Spain. For practical reasons, we had to limit our analysis to the scrutiny of one register of social media discourse on climate change in Spain, which is that of influential Spanish politicians’ tweets about climate change or global warming. The following section presents the motives of selection of this particular text-variety to conform the corpus of the present study.
Twitter and Political Discourse
Twitter was chosen among other social media platforms (e.g., Facebook, YouTube, etc.) to collect Spanish politicians’ online discourse about climate change, because it has become an indispensable political tool and the preferred medium for politicians to engage with the public (Carrasco-Polaino et al., 2018; Redek & Godnov, 2018).
In fact, the ‘register’Footnote 2 of political discourse enacted via Twitter has gained wide scholarly attention during the past decadeFootnote 3 in the critical discourse studies’ (CDS) domain. The singularity of Twitter as a political tool for self-representation (i.e., identities’ enactment) and creating engagement with the public has been pointed out by various linguists who describe ‘microblogging’ as: a “playing field between well-organized groups with plentiful resources and nascent or marginal groups looking to influence the policymaking process” (Gupta et al., 2018); and as a “rare opportunity” (Michele Zappavigna, 2017: 216) for linguists to uncover mass social practices reflecting communal set of shared values or opinions. Thus, the use of Twitter in the political arena is viewed as a tactic to influence the perception of the public and to maintain the hegemony of the powerful ‘elite’, given the fact that “elite users, comprising less than 0.05% of the user population, attract almost 50% of all attention within Twitter” (Wu et al., 2011: 5).
Currently, political tweeting about climate change in Spain remains an understudied area. Only recently, few studies have approached this discourse from different perspectives (e.g.: Carrasco-Polaino et al., 2022; Rodrigo-Cano, 2020; Smolak Lozano & Nakayama, 2022), nevertheless, to our knowledge, no previous linguistic research has yet studied climate change or global warming tweets posted by Spanish politicians.
Before presenting the theoretical foundations upon which this study relies, it is necessary to shed light on the genre of political discourse, since our corpus’ texts are classified as pertaining to this genre. Within the CDS domain, political discourse is viewed as the use of language to achieve a convincing representation of a “given view of reality” (Filardo-Llamas & Boyd, 2018: 318). More precisely, the language of political discourse is a construct of linguistic patterns and devices—across all linguistic levels from lexis to pragmatics—employed to persuade with a particular “perspective” in a given “context” (Filardo-Llamas & Boyd, 2018; van Dijk, 1990; Wilson, 2005). That is why, political communication has been viewed as an act of storytelling or a narrative (Jones et al., 2014; Mottier, 2008; De Fina, 2018). At the heart of political discourse, ideological representation and narration lies the concept of metaphor, which is defined as: “a device for seeing something in terms of something else” (Burke, 1941: 421).
In this respect, Chilton and Schäffner (2002: 29) explain that:
Metaphor can provide a conceptual structure for a systematized ideology that is expressed in many texts and much talk. It provides intertextual coherence (…) Lexical items usually regarded as opaque, unanalyzable, and conventionalized, frequently turn out to have conceptual coherence through a common underlying metaphorical schema.
Therefore, it is not through the analysis of metaphors in a given text that we unravel latent mental models in political discourse, but it is by means of the analysis of lexical and semantic configuration of a text that we reveal “the various metaphorical instantiations of a common underlying conceptual metaphor” (Dirven et al., 2003: 7).
Taking all previous points into consideration, we have opted to limit our analysis to the lexical and semantic patterning of the present corpus’ discourse. In the following section, we present the theoretical and methodological approaches that lay the foundation for our analysis and results.
Theoretical Underpinnings
This paper falls within critical discourse studies (CDS) which constitutes a broad research domain comprising a wide range of different methodologies and analytical frameworks, often of interdisciplinary nature, in order to provide a flexible toolkit for researchers to examine almost all kinds of discourse (e.g., textual, oral, visual). For instance, Twitter as a corpus has been approached by various methods and analytical frameworks within the realm of CDS; such as: appraisal theory by Martin and White (2005) in Zappavigna (2012), Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) developed by McBeth et al. (2014) in Gupta et al. (2018) and corpus linguistics methods (CorpLing) in Baker & McEnery (2015), to name a few.
The present study utilizes CorpLing tools in its methodological design, given its previously demonstrated efficiency in exploratory descriptive studies of textual corpora (e.g.: Baker, 2009; Stubbs, 2005). Despite the fact that the notion of “register” is central to this paper, the analysis performed in this study cannot be described as a ‘quantitative register analysis’ because of the critical dimension enclosed within the qualitative analysis (see Sect. 2). Thus, the present study’s objective is not to merely identify distinctive lexical and semantic features of the collected corpus representing a particular register, as it also attempts to explain and interpret the prominence of those distinctive features by drawing upon insights collected from pertinent analytical frameworks, following in that Baker and McEnery (2015) in their analysis of the Benefits Street corpus.
The final goal of the current study is to detect possible pervasive framings of climate change in Spanish politicians’ discourse on Twitter. The premise upon which our analysis is based, is that the selection of particular lexical items over others is driven by a specific worldview or an attitude (van Dijk, 1995). In their study of climate change discourse, Fløttum & Gjerstad (2017: 2) define framing as: “the process which implies a strategic selection (conscious or not) of language features for a particular purpose”. On her part, Moser (2010: 39) identifies a set of features that constitute a frame in climate change communication, stating that: “Frames are triggered by words, imagery, symbols, and non-verbal cues such as messengers, music, tone of voice, and gestures”. In fact, climate change communication, as a subset of environmental discourse, has been academically associated with the framing system as evidenced in Fernández-Vázquez and Sancho-Rodríguez (2020) and Dahl and Fløttum (2019), among others.
The reason behind this association is explained by Arran Stibbe, founder of the International Ecolinguistics Association, who argues that:
Ecolinguistics can explore the more general patterns of language that influence how people both think about, and treat, the world. It can investigate the stories we live by—mental models that influence behaviour and lie at the heart of the ecological challenges we are facing. (Stibbe, 2015: 1–2)
To recapitulate, the core of our analysis is statistically salient lexical patterns which are susceptible of conveying a particular worldview—taking into consideration the distinction between the reality (the world) and the wording of the reality (through language use). Then, it is through qualitative analysis of these salient lexical patterns use in context that recurrent themes are revealed, and as a result, the frames within which Spanish politicians tend to portray climate change on Twitter.
Climate Change Situation in Spain
According to the latest briefing published by the EPRS about Climate action in Spain (Simões & Victoria, 2021), Spain has achieved the reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 27% in the period between 2017—following the participation of Spain in the Paris Agreement in 2016—and 2019, surpassing the European average of GHG emissions reduction. The report also specifies that the two largest sectors emitting GHG in Spain are: transport sector (27%) and energy industry sector (16%).
Despite that, the study issued by the Spanish Climate Change Office (Sanz & Galán, 2020) has warned of multiple high risks of climate change impact in Spain like: the rise of ocean temperature exceeding current low gas emission scenarios by two to four times and the reduction of water resourcesFootnote 4, which will negatively impact energy production and the entire economic sector.
Given that the climate change impact in Spain started to be noticed around the seventies of the past decade, the government of Spain approved the Law 22/1988, Of July 28th, Of Coasts which has been subjected to many modification until it was changed into the Law 2/2013 of the 29th of May on the protection and sustainable use of coastal areas, according the MITECO (Ministerio de la Transición Ecológica y el Reto Demográfico) website (https://www.miteco.gob.es/). However, from 1988 to 2016, Spanish governmental legislations and action plans have failed to achieve favourable outcomes as reported by The European Climate Adaptation Platform:
Over the period 1980–2016, Spain was the fifth EU country with the highest economic losses in absolute terms caused by climate-related events, and increasing risks of droughts, biodiversity loss, forest fires, coastal flooding and heatwaves are among the critical ones and rank Spain in the top 3 most vulnerable EU Member States. (“Spain”, Climate-ADAPT, 2021)
In 2019, the COP25 was celebrated in Madrid, however, it was considered a failure in terms of the attempt to achieve significant reduction of global carbon emissions (Newell & Taylor, 2020). In addition to that, the report of the Spanish Climate Change Office (Sanz & Galán, 2020) also urged the Spanish government to establish more efficient adaptation policies to climate change impact in Spain as it concluded that climate change is already aggravated in Spain and that it will keep getting worse in the future, due to the lack of proper adaptation policies (Sanz & Galán, 2020).
As a result, Sánchez’s government approved the new Law 7/23, of May 20th, on Climate Change and Ecological Transition which has established the Spanish National Climate Change Adaptation Plan 2021–2030 (PNACC) (https://www.boe.es/).
Materials and Methods
This section begins with the presentation of the study’s corpus design and creation, then we describe the methods followed to arrive at our study’s results. In order to build a representative and balanced corpus of influential Spanish politicians’ tweeting about the climate, we set the following inclusion criteria: (1) the most influential Spanish politicians according to recent statistics, (2) Spanish politicians who have verified accounts on Twitter, (3) Spanish politicians who post frequently about “climate change” or “global warming” (> 3 tweets), and (4) Spanish politicians whose posts achieve high engagement (scoring > 50 on SparkToro scaleFootnote 5).
Accordingly, the latest edition of the list of the most influential 50 political leaders in Spain for 2022, published by the Marqués de Oliva Foundation in collaboration with Merca2 online periodical, was adopted for the purpose of selecting the subjects whose tweets would conform the corpus of the present study.Footnote 6 Previous editions of this list have already been used in recent academic research papers like that authored by García-Santamaría et al. (2020). After the exclusion of those leaders who do not meet the inclusion criteria, the following list (Table 1) of the most influential Spanish politicians who tweet frequently about Climate change/global warming was obtained:
The following step was to extract the above-mentioned politicians’ tweets about climate change. Hence, through the access obtained by Twitter API developers’ portal, a script was written to collect all tweets containing the search words “cambio climático”/climate change, “calentamiento global”/global warming, “efecto invernadero”/greenhouse effect and “medioambiente”/environment only from the above-mentioned politicians’ Twitter profiles. The resulting Climate Change Tweets by Spanish Politicians corpus (CCTSP) has reached the size of 20604 tokens, including tweets posted along the period between 29-11-2010 and 28-01-2022Footnote 7.
One of the key concepts that drive our analysis of the CCTSP corpus is that of “framing” which “essentially involves selection and salience” (Entmann, 1993: 52). It follows that keywords analysis—which is based on the notion of statistical “saliency” of lexical items in a given corpusFootnote 8—would aid in detecting recurrent frames in climate change communication by influential Spanish politicians via Twitter. Therefore, this piece of research followed a mixed-methods approach where the quantitative keywords analysis was combined with qualitative methods, which are: manual semantic classification of keywords as well as the extraction of their concordance lines.
The tool used in the generation of keywords of the CCTSP corpus as well as the extraction of concordance lines and collocations is the CQPweb (Hardie, 2012). The chosen reference corpus for comparison was the Europarl Spanish corpus (Tiedemann, 2012),Footnote 9 since reference corpora of “similar register will result in words very particular to the target corpus” (Hirch & Geluso, 2019: 233).
In order to compare both corpora, the CQPweb ran the log ratio (effect-size statistic) with log-likelihood filter (significance test) as a comparison statistic for each token of the target corpus. The tool extracted 106 positive keywords which were later filtered manually to exclude signs of punctuation, generic terms or symbols (e.g.: “@”, “http://”) as well as impertinent keywords (e.g.: “máis”, “é”). Later on, the final list of keywords was classified into three groups: content keywords (63), function keywords (11) and proper-nouns (12).Table 40, in the Appendices, presents the list of resulting positive keywords in the CCTSP corpus, providing the following data about each key wordform: its absolute and relative frequencies both in the target and reference corpus; its log ratio score, which represents “a doubling in size of the difference between the two corpora, for the keyword under consideration” (Hardie, 2014); and its log-likelihood value (with p value set to 0.0001). Each content keyword was manually assigned to its pertinent semantic category with the aid of Spanish Multilingual Central Repository 3.0 (MCR) database (Gonzalez-Agirre et al., 2012) (Table 41).
Results and Discussion
In the light of all previous data that contributes to a better contextualisation of the issue of climate change in Spain on a social, political and an academic level, in this section we present the quantitative data yielded by our keyword analysis, then we carry out the qualitative classification and organization of the data in order to be able to identify recurrent themes and frames in the CCTSP corpus.
Content keywords represent “robust indications of the text’s aboutness” (i.e.: its recurrent or salient themes and topics) (Scott, 2010: 43). Table 41, in the Appendices, shows keywords that have been classified as content words (i.e.: open-class words) along with their respective quantitative data and corresponding semantic domains. To help visualize the data obtained through the process of semantic classification of keywords, we have created the following word-cloud representing salient semantic domains in the CCTSP corpus (Fig. 2).
Word-cloud of semantic domains in the CCTSP corpus
The previous image represents a small-scale ontology of prominent semantic domains in Spanish political tweeting about what originally constitutes a meteorological phenomenon: the long-term heating of Earth's climate system. While there are nodes (e.g.: biology, law-policy, geology and politics) that are of expected occurrence in this register, given their globally acknowledged intersection with the phenomenon under study; Fig. 2 has foregrounded some seemingly odd semantic domains, such as: battle, competition and military. Through the examination of concordances lines of the keywords composing each semantic domain, we have been able to identify a set of register-specific leitmotifs. In what follows, we discuss qualitative results obtained by the analysis of concordance lines of each content keyword in terms of its role in the configuration of a recurrent image or frame in the CCTSP corpus. In other words, we have organized the qualitative analysis of prevalent semantic domains and their pertinent content keywords according to their interrelation and their observed conceptual proximity and textual co-occurrence.
Climate Change/Global Warming as a Meteorological Phenomenon
The first semantic domain in Table 2 constitutes the nucleus of our corpus, as it is comprised by two of the search terms used in scrapping the tweets that conform our corpus (see Section "Materials and Methods"). Looking through the collocates of both search terms: “cambio climático”/climate change and “calentamiento”/warming (Table 3), we have identified two main linguistic patterns that occur around meteorological keywords.
The first pattern depicts climate change as if it were a naturally occurring disaster whose only victim is the human race. The following concordances (Table 4) illustrate examples of the demonization of climate change/global warming against the ‘benevolence’ of humans who need to either control or fight it; hence the presence of dynamic-processes and battle keywords in our corpus.
The tag “demoledor”/devastating results as key in our corpus (Table 21) because of its prominent use in the description of climate change impact in our corpus. Interestingly, though, the use of the keyword “clima”/climate—when not collocating with “change”—in the CCTSP corpus reflects an opposite view where Earth’s climate is portrayed as the victim in need of rescuing (Table 5).
Thus, in the register of Spanish political tweeting about climate change, the most frequent representation of this meteorological crisis is that of a battle where humans need to fight the enemy (i.e.: global warming) and advance towards a sustainable life (Table 6).
The second linguistic pattern occurring around the climate change node is the framing of the crisis as a matter of policy-making. Both left- and right-wing parties take advantage of climate change tweeting to declare their disapproval of the Spanish laws and policies concerning the environment or their lack of agreement about them (Table 7). If we zoom in some of the following examples, we will find traces of strong evaluative language (highlighted in bold in Table 7) that stir feelings of fear, anger or confusion, respectively, in the public opinion: the law of climate change will possibly harm Galician fish preserves and put into risk 40,000 jobs (Casado-Blanco, 2020), the law of climate change is disappointing “far from achieving the bare minimum” (Iñigo Errejón, 2021), the law of climate change needs “amendments in its entirety” (Meritxell Batet, 2020). Some tweets refer to the dismissal of the law by specific political parties, while others declare explicitly that the government has an interest in passing the law of climate change without the consent of the parliament, which creates an atmosphere of uncertainty and suspicion about the law project.
In this respect, we should add that the weight that the keywords “transición”/transition—that collocates exclusively with either the adjective “ecológica”/ecological or “energética”/energetic (Table 33)—acquires inside the CCTSP corpus is due to the overreference to the Spanish Law of Climate Change and Ecological Transition.
“Sostenibilidad”/Sustainability is another keyword that refers to Spanish policies regarding climate change, yet, unlike the cluster “ley de cambio climático/Law of climate change”, it is likely to occur in contexts of figurative language (highlighted in bold in Table 8) which reveal a tendency to regard sustainability as an abstract solution to the problem rather than a well-defined policy or an action plan (Table 9).
The Environment as an Endangered Body
On Twitter, Spanish politicians regard ecosystems, biodiversity and the environment as an unattended body which falls completely under humans’ control. Collocates of biological keywords (Table 10) insist over the framing of nature as well as the whole planet as a human possession.
Five of these collocates inculcate the metaphor of nature as an endangered body that belongs to the human race (hence, the overuse of nuestro/our as a collocate) that is represented as the only saviour capable of caring for/defending/protecting it. In order to grasp how this metaphor has been construed in political speeches along the years, it can be contrasted with anti-anthropocentric approaches to environmental protection.
In what follows, we examine framings of human activity (highlighted in bold in Table 11) in the pursuit of recovering nature, life and the planet from the threat of the global warming crisis. The next table of concordances (Table 11) provides examples of the use of biology keywords as well as the keywords: “planeta” and “vida”. All of the examples depict climate change as the villain that threatens human possessions and existence on Earth, and thus, humans fight back to save biodiversity, the environment, ecological units, life and the planet. All of these keywords turn to be semantically equivalent as they refer to natural resources falling completely under human will and control.
Regarding possible action pathways in the fight against climate change, our semantic classification of salient keywords in the CCTSP corpus point to specific fields of action toward the solution of the problem, which are listed in Table 9. This corpus’ register was dominated by the perception of this global catastrophe as a matter of geological management. For almost a decade (2010–2021), the only Spanish legislation that figured as the enacted policy to face the climate change problem was the Spanish coastal law: Ley de costas.Footnote 10 The climate change and energy transition law has only been recently approved by the Spanish parliament, on the 20th of May 2021.
In parallel, the solution to global warming was, also, framed as lying within the ecopolitical sphere. Keywords referring to economic practices (Table 9) occur frequently and prominently in our corpus yet their concordance plots are unbalanced, meaning that each Spanish politician would stress over one particular economic solution over the others. For example, Juan Manuel Moreno, president of the Autonomous Government of Andalusia (2019 till current), advocates for circular economy whereas the Spanish Minister of Consumer Affairs, Alberto Garzón Espinosa (2020 till current), insists on consumption reduction as the principal strategy to reduce the effects of climate change.
Lexical cues of political solutions to climate change in our corpus rely on the overuse of the keyword “compromiso”/commitment whose concordances (Table 12) reveal how climate change crisis do play a vital role in political ethos representation. Spanish politicians rival to confirm and to convince with better commitment from their part to the environment and to offering a solution to the crisis.
The word “compromiso”/commitment is often surrounded by up-scaling devices and vocabulary of positive appreciation (e.g.: solid commitment, complete and absolute commitment, unequivocal commitment, etc.) to present the authorial voice as worthy of leadership in the battle against climate change.
Despite the fact that “global”/global has been one of the search keywords used to collect our corpus (in “calentamiento global/global warming”), concordance lines of this lemma proved that its saliency in our corpus is not exclusively linked to “global warming” (which accounts for almost 20% of all its concordances). Other contexts of use of this keyword exhibit an opposite stance adopted by the authorial voice which backgrounds its political persona. The authorial voice chooses to stress on the “global” dimension of the problem almost exclusively when it needs to promote alliances with foreign countries or entities (highlighted in bold in Table 13). The individual, local or regional efforts are downsized in these particular contexts where external relations and foreign affairs are foregrounded, such as in the following examples:
Lastly, cognitive approaches toward the solution are labelled by the keyword “modelo”/model which is taken to refer to the Spanish governmental planning and strategies in economy, education, food or energy sectors. In all of its hits in our corpus (21), the meaning of change is either implied or explicitly stated around this keyword (Table 14).
Climate Change as a War
Influential Spanish leaders often opt to rely on the “Climate Change As A War” metaphor when tweeting about their goals or achievements regarding the management of global warming (Table 15). Concordances of the keyword “luch*/fight”Footnote 11 (Table16) usually foregrounds the role of either a part of the Spanish territories, albeit a city, a region, a province; or the whole country (highlighted in red in Table 16) as a frontliner in the “war” against climate change. The keyword “lucha”/fight usually occurs with either up-scaling devices (e.g.: más/most, mejor defiende/best defend), martial vocabulary (e.g.: the keyword: vanguardia/forefront) or expressions of positive inscribed judgement. Relatively fewer concordances of luch* deal with the “war against climate change” as a global cause with humanity as its principal protagonist.
Contexts of use of this particular keyword reflect the following repetitive pattern: the authorial voice portrays itself as the hero or the saviour who urges the community that it represents to admit its views as being the only way towards salvation. This sense of urgency is usually realized through the use of modal verbs of obligation (highlighted in bold in Table 17) instead of the use of the imperative which appears to occur solely in contexts where the authorial voice chooses to address opposing political parties, to foreground their incompetence and their lack of responsibility (see second line in Table 17). In this regard, Martin & White (2005: 111) explain the shift in the authorial voice positioning from the imperative to the use of modal verbs, stating that:
The imperative is monoglossic in that it neither references, nor allows for the possibility of, alternative actions. The modal, in contrast, explicitly grounds the demand in the subjectivity of the speaker—as an assessment by the speaker of obligation rather than as a command.
It follows that the battle against global warming takes the form of a competition among those who are in charge to prove themselves as the first winner, in the race against this global phenomenon. Concordances of competition keywords (i.e.: combatir/combat, proteger/protect, apostar/bet on or commit to) show a repeated representation of abstract entities in the form of either potential gains or useful weapons (highlighted in bold in Table 18) in the hands of the authorial voice who battles against the villain: the climate change. Likewise, competition keywords tend to co-occur with modal verbs of obligation (highlighted in bold in Table 18) and the collectivization of social actorsFootnote 12 performing the role of the agentive subject (e.g.: los liberales/liberals).
Another salient feature detected through the analysis of concordances of the key node “lucha contra el cambio climático/fight against the climate change” is the overuse of the coordinating conjunction “y”/and which has, in fact, resulted as one of this cluster’s collocates scoring a log ratio value of 1.26. The next table of concordances (Table 19) illustrates the coupling of “climate change”—which is quintessentially an ecological issue—with other socio-economic threats pressuring the Spanish people (e.g.: “brecha salarial”/pay gap, “igualdad”/gender equality). Thus, in the discourse of the CCTSP corpus, there exists a tendency towards an intentional pairing between climate change and other sociological issues that are framed to seem as of equivalent magnitude (Levin, 1964).
That is why, sociology has resulted as one of the principal semantic domains of the CCTSP corpus. Sociological keywords are used exclusively in contexts of juxtaposition between environmental issues and sociological problems, particularly that of inequality and gender discrimination. In fact, it is a globally acknowledged trend to portray the feminine gender as the true victim of the global warming disaster and as the only potential saviour, because:
[w]omen commonly face higher risks and greater burdens from the impacts of climate change in situations of poverty, and the majority of the world’s poor are women. Women’s unequal participation in decision-making processes and labour markets compound inequalities and often prevent women from fully contributing to climate-related planning, policy-making and implementation. (United Nations, Climate change, UNFCC 2019)
In the CCTSP corpus, concordance lines of “desigualdad”/inequality and “feminismo”/feminism reveal traces of ecofeminism through the framing of climate change as correlating to gender inequality (Table 20).
The first line of concordance (Table 20) demonstrates how this pairing holds true in the negative sense too, meaning that those who deny climate change are also defenders of inequality among men and women.
Labelling
In the CCTSP corpus, there exists a set of attributes’ categories (Table 21) that collect labelling (Jeffries, 2017) tokens. Colour_attribute domain is comprised solely by the colour “verde”/green which is world-widely taken to symbolize biosystems and nature. This suggests that political discourse on Twitter conceives the climate change disaster as an issue related to nature rather than a man-made problem. What supports this observation is the lack of mention of other colours, like: red, yellow or blue, which are associated with global warming representation as evidenced in Mahony and Hulme (2012). Throughout the past decade, not only do Spanish politicians choose to colour their discourse about climate change and global warming in ‘green’, they also take ‘going green’ as a competition arena. The authorial voice is usually represented as ‘going green’-erFootnote 13 than the rivals (i.e.: other political leaders) who are occasionally accused of ‘greenwashing’ (e.g.: see fourth and fifth lines in Table 22).
All other kinds of attributes contribute to sketch the ‘climate change as a villain/monster’ frame, as this global disaster gets often labelled by “reto”/challenge or threat whose contexts usually portray the authorial voice as the hero leading the battle against climate change for the addressees to follow (hence, the overuse of the keyword “juntos”/together in our corpus) (Table 21). The solution to the problem is often represented by a couple of labels that are world-widely known to be associated with the preservation of the environment: “verde”/green and “sostenible”/sustainable. The following table of concordances (Table 23) shows that colour, assessment and quality attributes tend to co-occur within the same context.
The semantic domain of psychology (Fig. 2) also gathers keywords that display an attitude through putting a label to describe affect and judgement. Those who do not believe in climate change are negatively represented, not in terms of their unscientific reasoning but in terms of their rather disordered or unsound mindset. Furthermore, the co-text surrounding the keyword “negacionismo”/denial inspire emotions of fear (e.g.: más peligrosa/more dangerous) and anger (e.g.: su negacionismo mata/their denialism kills) towards the actions of those who deny the phenomenon of climate change (Table 24).
The keyword “urge”/to urge or press, on the other hand, sheds light on a side of the psychological profile of the addresser who labels his/her proposition as a compelling desire or demand. Interestingly, the contexts where this verb occurs show a more vulnerable addresser (protagonist) who usually solicits assistance from more powerful bodies (e.g.: the EU or the government of Spain). Perhaps a look-back to the classics may elucidate the repeated scene depicted in concordance lines of the verb urge (Table 25), as each line represents a narrative with a hero, a setting, a plot and a moral of the story.
The common element shared by all these narratives is the foregrounding of the helper’s role which is described in the following extract from The Morphology of Folktale:
if the agent received [i.e.: the helper] is a living creature, its help is directly put to use on the command of the hero. With this the hero outwardly loses all significance; he himself does nothing, while his helper accomplishes everything. The morphological significance of the hero is nevertheless very great, since his intentions create the axis of the narrative. These intentions appear in the form of various commands which the hero gives to his helpers. (Propp, 2003: 50)
Zooming in into the narratives configured in the previous examples (Table 25), we will find that in the first line the authorial voice (i.e.: the hero) resorts to European fundsFootnote 14 in order to solve the problem of coastline contamination. In the second line, the authorial voice calls and waits for the help from the European Union, while in the third, the helper takes the form of youth protests against politicians’ inaction. Finally, in the fourth line the sense of urgency foregrounds the vulnerability and incapacity of the authorial voice who condemns humanity for its passivity towards the problem.
Climate Change as a Matter of Social Interaction
This section begins with describing prominent social actors in the CCTSP corpus’ discourse, then we proceed to explore salient social processes in the corpus, and lastly, we examine communicative events that are distinctive of the present corpus’ discourse (Table 26). The semantic category “person” includes keywords that categorize social actors who are likely to occur in Spanish political tweeting about climate change. By categorization of social actors, we mean the reference to salient groups of participants in our corpus’ discourse. For instance, the analysed tweets featured only two demonyms which are: people of Madrid and people of Andalusia. While the latter can be dismissed due to its unbalanced occurrence along our corpus (it occurred only in Juan Manuel Moreno’s tweets); the former, despite being of low frequency, has obtained a relatively high log ratio value (51.11).
Not only does the CCTSP corpus’ register allow for the classification of victims of this global crisis according to their home-town (e.g.: the first two concordance lines in the previous table reveal an extra care towards “la salud de los madrileños”/People of Madrid health), it also tends to overly-represent the capital as the leader in the war against climate change in Spain (Table 27).
Likewise, patterns of use of professionally categorized social actors (i.e.: “ecologistas”/ecologists and “gobierno”/government) reveal traces of the centralist approachFootnote 15 ingrained in Spanish politicians’ worldview communicated on Twitter. Firstly, the relatively few references to the role of ecologists (log ratio value of 31.87) in a corpus about climate change and the environment, gives an idea of the ‘marginalisation’ of this group when compared to political leaders and/or members of the government as the log ratio score of “gobierno” is 2669.38. Secondly, the lexical patterning around this token shows an intentional backgrounding of ecologists who are depicted as a powerless group that is incapable of taking an action. In all three tweets, the authorial voice is foregrounded as the sole decision maker who chooses to listen to ecologists (e.g.: see third line of Table 28) or to inform of their views through external attributionFootnote 16 (see first and second lines of Table 28).
On the other hand, concordances of the keyword “gobierno” depict the central government in charge as the only entity having the upper hand in setting policies regarding how to handle this global disaster. When talking about governmental action towards the management of climate change on Twitter, influential Spanish politicians limit their discourse to praise or attack the government in charge, using mostly vocabulary of either positive or negative judgement or appreciation (highlighted in bold in Table 29).
Another distinctive pattern in the contexts of use of “gobierno” is the foregrounding of central or local governmental achievements employing linguistic devices of regional or political classification (e.g.: the genitive construction: X de Y) around the key node “gobierno”/government (Table 30). This centralist approach also leaves its mark on the configuration of leadership perception in the CCTSP corpus. In all of its occurrences, “liderar”/to lead takes, uniquely, as a subject, entities that refer to central or regional governments: “Madrid debe liderar”/Madrid must lead, “Andalucía quiere liderar”/Andalusia wants to lead, “España tiene que liderar”/Spain has to lead…
The other distinctive social processes in our corpus display actions of solidarity and social participation: cuidar-cuida/protect(s), impulsar/boost or promote. These verbs turn to reinforce the frame of the environment, planet and human life as an endangered body that needs a serious intervention by the saviour (see section 3.2). Contexts of use of both keywords (Table 31) reflect a setting that is built upon on one or more of the following elements: (1) giving praise or support (i.e.: showing positive affect) (see third line), (2) expressing urgency by means of deontic modals (see fifth line), and (3) foregrounding financial resources (see fourth line).
According to Martin and White (2005) both the use of deontic modals and the first-person plural possessive (e.g.: “nuestro”/our in the third line of Table 31) constitute useful linguistic resources to achieve engagement and better alignment with the addressees as well as the contraction of dialogistic alternatives in order to prepare the putative reader to accept the views being communicated as the only valid option. Regarding the deployment of the financial frame in social keywords’ contexts, this observation supports evidence from previous research like that of Shanahan (2007: 2) who points out that: “the ‘money’ frame will chime with politicians and the private sector” in his review of media coverage of climate change in the UK.
The social dimension in the CCTSP corpus is manifested too in communication keywords, which allude to preferred moulds of social interaction inside this particular register. While it is only logical to find communication vocabulary in a corpus collected from a social media platform; the keywords “enhorabuena”/congratulations and “entrevista”/interview are not the typical communication vocabulary that is of expected recurrence in other media registers like press discourse. For example, in their study of English press discourse, Jeffries and Walker (2017: 30) state that their keywords analysis generated the following communication wordforms: say, admitted, insisted and revealed. In contrast, our corpus is rich in felicitations and video sharing of television interviews that reflect a rather positive over-representation of the self by means of evaluative expressions of affect, judgement or appreciationFootnote 17 (highlighted in bold in Table 32).
Our findings go in line with previous research that detects heavier self-centred tendencies in political communication on social media platforms (Papacharissi, 2010: 238), which is manifested in the overrepresentation of self-image. Of quite relevance, too, is the statistical analysis carried out by Kristinsdottir et al. (2021) that demonstrates a positive statistical correlation between narcissism and the frequent use of social media platforms, especially Twitter. Their analysis gives an explanation to the possible reasons behind the prominence of exchanging positive feedback on Twitter and sharing content that involves great deal of self-representation (as for example, videos of broadcast interviews in the case of CCTSP corpus):
individuals high on communal narcissism value power and grandiosity in a communal domain, by seeking admiration for being a “saint”. Individuals high on communal narcissism rate themselves high on traits such as altruism, benevolence and warmth towards others, but are extremely driven by the need to validate power. (Kristinsdottir et al., 2021: 2)
Causes and Consequences of Climate Change
These categories are grouped together because they include keywords that refer to causes and consequences of climate change as viewed and communicated in the CCTSP corpus (Table 33).
Carbon dioxide emissions, which is the principal cause of the climate change disaster, occur in the CCTSP corpus 1.6 times per 1000 words (Table 34). The contexts where one of these four keywords: “CO2”, “gases”, “emisiones”, “efecto invernadero”, are employed usually to express disappointment with set policies regarding gas emissions. Vocabulary of explicit negative affect, appreciation and judgement can be found in almost all of the previous keywords’ contexts:
Given that the transport sector in Spain is the main culprit of global warming in Spain (see section 1.3), the collected tweets forming the CCTSP corpus underrepresents this topic, in terms of frequencies and lexical diversity since the only keyword that was found to be pertaining to the semantic category of transportation was “movilidad”/transportation which occurs once every 1000 words. In this respect, it has been pointed out that the Spanish press, during the first decade of the XXI century, deliberately ignored discussing transportation as the reason behind climate change (Chávez, 2013; Hernández et al., 2016).
On another note, direct current consequences of global warming in Spain, such as “calor”/heat and “incendios”/wildfires occur 0.2 times and 0.6 times per 1000 words, respectively. Occurrences of both keywords correlate with vocabulary of negative affect and appreciation which is accompanied, sometimes, with up-scaling devices (e.g.: “intenso”/intense) (Table 35).
Regarding water problems caused by global warming in Spain, they do get a relatively higher attention than the heat and wildfires, as the keyword “agua”/water has a normalised frequency of 1 per 1000 words. Qualitative analysis of this keyword’s contexts shows that influential Spanish politicians tend to focus on the following three axes when discussing water problems: (1) water scarcity (see first and second lines), (2) water pollution (see third line), and (3) water conservation (see fourth line) (Table 36).
Temporalization of Climate Change
In the present corpus’ register, discussing climate change is often realized around specific time frames referring to the present moment of the speech or the near future (Tables 37, 38). The only two wordforms that have resulted as collocating with “hoy”/today are the auxiliary verbs he and hemos conjugated with the first-person pronoun, singular and plural. This reinforces previous findings suggesting the overrepresentation of self-image by foregrounding recent actions or daily contributions of the authorial voice regarding the matter of climate change (see section 3.5).
Previous recent studies have already pointed out that climate change communication in the Spanish press peaks around international global warming events, like climate change conferences (Fernández-Reyes, 2010; Fernández-Reyes et al., 2015). Similarly, our corpus data also alludes to more frequent tweeting about the issue around the years 2019 and 2021 (Table 39), which are the dates corresponding to the organization of COP25 held in Madrid, and the passing of the climate change law in Spain, respectively.
Conclusions
Through computer assisted discourse (CAD) analysis of a decade of Spanish politicians’ tweets about climate change/global warming, we have been able to identify a set of distinctive images, themes and frames that are susceptible of shaping the public perception of the issue. In this section, we summarize key findings of the analysis.
The metaphors that pervade Spanish politicians’ communication of climate change on Twitter are those representing the human race as in war against climate change, and thus, climate change is portrayed as the villain, as if it were a natural disaster rather than human-caused. The main culprit of climate change, which is gas emissions, completely absents the ‘war against climate change’ metaphors’ contexts.
Among the thematic components that have been found to permeate our corpus’ discourse is the reference to sustainability, ecological transition and environmentally friendly (i.e.: green) lifestyles as key abstract solutions to climate change, with no further detail on ways of their implementation. Similarly, the affinity between climate change as an environmental problem and other social problems in Spain, especially gender inequality, has been repeatedly observed throughout our corpus. The centralist approach adopted by the Spanish government has also turned into one of the main themes in the CCTSP corpus, together with the heavy usage of the language of evaluation that is directed to condemn political opponents’ actions or policies and/or to praise one self’s endeavours in the war against climate change.
Finally, our mixed-methods analysis of the CCTSP corpus has contributed to uncover a systemic worldview of the global warming phenomenon as a self-occurring threat. Thus, the generalized narrative of climate change implies a political leader who takes on the role of the saviour against an enemy in a setting of a war or competition, as well as a proposed solution (i.e.: moral of the story) that excels in the battle against the overheating of Earth’s climate. Further future studies are needed to build upon these primitive results through applying more specific analytical frameworks like the Narrative Policy Framework (McBeth et al., 2014) and Appraisal Theory Framework (Martin & White, 2005) to the study of the linguistic patterns and frames detected in the present paper which constitute the first attempt towards the final goal of dismounting unworking narratives of climate change in Spain and building new narratives that lead to more effective action.
Notes
Up to the year 2005, there were only four academic publications about climate change communication in Spain (Evriti & León, 2017: 2).
In this paper, we use the term “register” to refer to a text variety associated with a certain situation or a purpose (Biber, 1994: P. 32)
Zappavigna (2017: 203) gives a brief history of CDS research performed on corpora extracted from Twitter.
One of the current manifestations of the reduction of water resources in Spain is the drought suffered by the Tagus River basin in the Iberian Peninsula, which has been documented in the paper published by Sodermann & De Oliviera (2022: 1) who conclude that: “climate change will significantly change the stream flow regime and reduce water availability in the Tagus River basin”.
SparkToro tool is an online resource that measures the influence of a Twitter account by taking into account the size of the account as well as the engagement it receives (https://sparktoro.com/tools/sparkscore).
The latest edition of the list for 2022, together with the method of analysis and selection, is available in: https://los500.merca2.es/project/los-50-politicos-mas-influyentes-en-espana-en-2022/
The corpus collection process ended on Saturday, the 29th of January 2022, at 20:08:44 (GMT+2).
In CorpLing analysis, the term “saliency” refers to the statistically significant repetition of a lexical item in a given corpus. The statistical significance is calculated by performing log-likelihood test for each token of the corpus under study, taking into account its frequency both in the target corpus and the reference corpus (Baker, 2006).
The Europarl Spanish corpus is a tagged corpus consisting of approximately 40 million words extracted from the proceedings of the European Parliament covering several topics including climate change: https://ec.europa.eu/info/topics_en.
The keyword “costas”/coasts is used to refer to Spanish coastal law in all of its occurrences in the CCTSP corpus.
The asterisk (*) is a regular expression that refers to any string of characters following the word-root preceding it.
According to van Leeuwen’s model: “The representation of social actors”, collectivization is the representation of social actors as participants of a homogenous group (van Leeuwen, 1995: 50).
The word “más”/more is the first function word that has resulted as a collocate of the keyword “verde”/green in the CCTSP corpus.
Ecomares project was fully funded by the European Union (EFE, 17 enero 2020).
Similar findings revealing strong centralist approaches in the Spanish government were observed in a recent study of the Spanish governmental response in times of the Covid-19 crisis (Navarro & Velasco, 2022).
Martin & White (2005: 102) define attribution as the representation of the proposition communicated by the addresser “as grounded in the subjectivity of an external voice” in order to achieve a more heteroglossic engagement with the addressees.
Appraisal framework developed by Martin & White (2005) gives full account of possible linguistic resources employed in expressing affect (emotion), judgement (ethics) and appreciation (aesthetics).
References
Zappavigna, M. (2017). Twitter. In C. R. Hoffmann & W. Bublitz (Eds.), Pragmatics of Social Media (pp. 201–224). De Gruyter.
(2015). Introduction to gender and climate change. United Nations Climate change. https://cop23.unfccc.int/gender [retrieved: 10.11.2022].
(2021). “Spain”. Climate-ADAPT. https://climate-adapt.eea.europa.eu/en/countries-regions/countries/spain [retrieved: 10.11.2022].
Baker, P., & McEnery, T. (2015). Who benefits when discourse gets democratised? Analysing a Twitter Corpus around the British Benefits Street Debate. In P. Baker & T. McEnery (Eds.), Corpora and discourse studies (pp. 244–265). Palgrave Macmillan.
Baker, P. (2006). Using corpora in discourse analysis. Continuum.
Baker, P. (2009). Contemporary Corpus Linguistics. Continuum.
Biber, D. (1994). An analytical framework for register studies. In D. Biber & E. Finegan (Eds.), Sociolinguistic perspectives on register (pp. 31–58). Oxford University Press.
Burke, K. (1941). Four master tropes. Kenyon Review, 3(4), 421–438.
Carrasco-Polaino, R., Lafuente-Pérez, P., & Luna-García, A. (2022). Twitter como canal para el activismo hacia el cambio climático durante la COP26. Estudios Sobre El Mensaje Periodístico, 28(3), 511–523. https://doi.org/10.5209/esmp.80647[retrieved:10.11.2022]
Carrasco-Polaino, R., Villar-Cirujano, E., & Tejedor-Fuentes, L. (2018). Twitter como herramienta de comunicación política en el contexto del referéndum independentista catalán: asociaciones ciudadanas frente a instituciones públicas. Revista De Comunicación y Tecnologías Emergentes, 16(1), 64–85. https://doi.org/10.7195/ri14.v16i1.1134
Chávez, R. M. (2013). El silencio mediático. Reflexión en torno a las razones de los medios de comunicación para no hablar del cambio climático. Actas de las Jornadas Internacionales Medios de Comunicación y Cambio Climático, 233–248.
Chilton, P. A., & Schäffner, C. (2002). Themes and principles in the analysis of political discourse. In P. A. Chilton & C. Schäffner (Eds.), Politics as text and talk: Analytic approaches to political discourse (pp. 1–41). John Benjamins.
Dahl, T., & Fløttum, K. (2019). Climate change as a corporate strategy issue: A discourse analysis of three climate reports from the energy sector. Corporate Communications: an International Journal, 24(3), 499–514. https://doi.org/10.1108/CCIJ-08-2018-0088[retrieved:10.11.2022]
Dirven, R., Frank, R., & Pütz, M. (2003). Introduction: Categories, cognitive models and ideologies. In R. dirven, R. Frank & M. Pütz (Eds.), Cognitive models in language and thought. Ideology, metaphors and meanings (pp. 1–24). Mouton de Gruyter.
Entmann, M. (1993). Framing: Toward clarification of a fractured paradigm. Journal of Communication, 43(4), 51–58. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1993.tb01304.x[retrieved:10.11.2022]
Erviti, M. C., & León, B. (2017). Climate change communication in Spain. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Climate Science. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228620.001.0001/acrefore-9780190228620-e-460
Fernández-Reyes, R. (2010). Irrupción mediática y representación ideológica del cambio climático en España. Contribuciones a las Ciencias Sociales. www.eumed.net/rev/cccss/10/ [retrieved: 10.11.2022]
Fernández-Reyes, R., Piñuel-Raigada, J. L., & Vicente-Mariño, M. (2015). La cobertura periodística del cambio climático y del calentamiento global en El País, El Mundo y La Vanguardia. Revista Latina De Comunicación Social, 70, 122–140.
Fernández-Vázqueza, J., & Sancho-Rodríguez, A. (2020). Critical discourse analysis of climate change in IBEX 35 companies. Technological Forecasting and Social Change. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2020.120063
Filardo-Llamas, L., & Boyd, M. S. (2018). Critical discourse analisis and politics. In J. Flowerdew & J. E. Richardson (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of critical discourse studies (pp. 312–327). Routledge.
Fina, A. D. (2018). Narrative analysis. In R. Wodak & B. Forchtner (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of language and politics (pp. 233–246). Routledge.
Fløttum, K., & Gjerstad, Ø. (2017). Narratives in climate change discourse. Wires Climate and Change, 8, e429. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.429
García-Santamaría, J., Pérez-Serrano, M., & Rodríguez-Pallares, M. (2020). Portavoces oficiales y estrategia audiovisual en la crisis de la Covid-19 en España. El Profesional De La Información. https://doi.org/10.3145/epi.2020.sep.13
Gonzalez-Agirre, A., Laparra, E., & Rigau, G. (2012). “Multilingual central repository version 3.0”, LREC. 2525-2529. https://adimen.si.ehu.es/ [retrieved: 10.11.2022].
Gupta, K., Ripberger, J., & Wehde, W. (2018). Advocacy Group Messaging on Social Media: Using the Narrative Policy Framework to Study Twitter Messages about Nuclear Energy Policy in the United States. PSJ, 46, 119–136. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12176
Halliday, M. A. K. (2001). New ways of meaning: The challenge to applied linguistics. In A. Fill & P. Mühlhäusler (Eds.), The Ecolinguistics Reader: Language (pp. 175–202). Ecology and Environment: Continuum.
Hardie, A. (2012). CQPweb—Combining power, flexibility and usability in a corpus analysis tool. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 17(3), 380–409.
Hardie, A. (2014). “Log Ratio—An informal introduction”. ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS). https://cass.lancs.ac.uk/log-ratio-an-informal-introduction/ [retrieved: 08.02.2023].
Hernández, F.H., Meira, P.A. & Del Álamo, J.B. (2016). “A deafening silence. The decline of climate change communication in Spain 2008-2012”, Redes.com 13/31, 31-56.
Jeffries, L. & Walker, B. (2017). Keywords in the Press: The New Labour Years. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Jeffries, L. (2017). Critical stylistics: The power of English. Bloomsburry Publishing.
Hirch, R. & Geluso, J. (2019). The reference corpus matters. Comparing the effect of different reference corpora on keyword analysis. Register Studies, 1(2), 209–242. https://doi.org/10.1075/rs.18001.gel[retrieved:10.11.2022]
Jones, M. D., Shanahan, E. A., & McBeth, M. K. (2014). The science of stories. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137485861[retrieved:08.02.2023]
Kristinsdottir, K. H., Gylfason, H. F., & Sigurvinsdottir, R. (2021). Narcissism and social media: The role of communal narcissism. International Journal of Environment Research Public Health. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph181910106
Levin, S. R. (1964). Linguistic structures in poetry. Mouton.
Mahony, M., & Hulme, M. (2012). The colour of risk: An exploration of the IPCC’s “Burning Embers” diagram. Spontaneous Generations: A Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science, 6(1), 75–89. https://doi.org/10.4245/sponge.v6i1.16075[retrieved:10.11.2022]
Martin, J.R. & White P.R.R. (2005). The Language of Evaluation. Appraisal in English. Palgrave Macmillan.
Blanco-Castilla, E., Quesada-Pérez, M., & Teruel-Rodríguez, L. (2013). Entre Kioto y Durban: Posición editorial de los medios de referencia ante el cambio climático. Revista Latina De Comunicación Social, 68, 420–435.
McBeth, M. K., Jones, M. D., Shanahan, E. A. (2014). The Science of Stories. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137485861. [retrieved: 10.11.2022].
Moser, S. C. (2010). Communicating climate change: history, challenges, process and future directions. Wires Climate Change, 1, 31–53. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.11
Mottier, V. (2008) Metaphors, Mini-Narratives and Foucauldian Discourse Theory. in T. Carver & J. Pikalo (Eds), Political Language and Metaphor London: Routledge. 182–194.
Navarro, C., & Velasco, F. (2022). From centralization to new ways of multi-level coordination: Spain’s intergovernmental response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Local Government Studies, 48(2), 191–210. https://doi.org/10.1080/03003930.2022.2042683
Newell, P., & Taylor, O. (2020). Fiddling while the planet burns? COP25 in perspective. Globalizations, 17(4), 580–592. https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2020.1726127
Papacharissi, Z. (2009). The virtual sphere 2.0: The internet, the public sphere and beyond. In A. Chadwick & P. N. Howard (Eds.) Routledge handbook of internet politics (pp. 230-245). Routledge.
Propp, V. (2003). Morphology of the Folktale. (L. Scott, Trans.). University of Texas Press (Original work published 1968).
Redek, T., & Godnov, U. (2018). Twitter as a political tool in EU countries during the economic crisis: A comparative text-mining analysis. Drustvena Istrazivanja. https://doi.org/10.5559/di.27.4.06
Rodrigo-Cano, D. (2020). “La comunicación en Twitter del cambio climático: una mirada desde la educación ambiental”, in R. Fernández-Reyes, D. Rodrigo-Cano & I. Tourinho Girardi (coords.) Comunicación y Cambio Climático. Contribuciones actuales (pp. 87–110). Ediciones Egregius.
Sanz, M. J., & Galán, E. (Eds.). (2020). Impactos y riesgos derivados del cambio climático en España. Oficina Española de Cambio Climático. Ministerio para la Transición Ecológica y el Reto Demográfico.
Scott, M. (2010). Problems in investigating keyness, or clearing the undergrowth and marking out trails…. In M. Bondi & M. Scott (Eds.), Keyness in Texts (pp. 43–58). John Benjamins Publishing.
Shanahan, M. (2007). Talking about a revolution: climate change and the media. COP13 Briefing and Opinion Papers. IIED. https://www.osti.gov/etdeweb/biblio/22059773 [retrieved: 10.11.2022].
Simões, H. M., & Victoria, G. A. (2021). “Climate Action in Spain”. Climate Action Research and Tracking Service, Members' Research Service. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2021/690579/EPRS_BRI(2021)690579_EN.pdf [retrieved: 10.11.2022].
Smolak Lozano, E., & Nakayama, A. (2022). Análisis semántico de discurso en social media sobre el cambio climático y calentamiento global con el enfoque en la opinión pública acerca de Greta Thunberg. CUICIID 2022. Madrid. España. Forum XXI. https://hdl.handle.net/10630/25324 [retrieved: 08.02.2023].
Sondermann, M. N., & de Oliveira, R. P. (2022). Climate adaptation needs to reduce water scarcity vulnerability in the Tagus River Basin. Water. https://doi.org/10.3390/w14162527
Stibbe, A. (2015). Ecolinguistics. Language, ecology and the stories we live by. Routledge.
Stubbs, M. (2005). Conrad in the computer: Examples of quantitative stylistic methods. Language and Literature, 14(1), 5–24. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963947005048873[retrieved:10.11.2022]
Tiedemann, J. (2012). Parallel data, tools and interfaces in OPUS. LREC, 12, 2214–2218.
van Dijk, T. A. (1990). Discourse & society: A new journal for a new research focus. Discourse & Society, 1, 5–16. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926590001001001[retrieved:08.02.2023]
van Dijk, T. A. (1995). Discourse semantics as ideology. Discourse & Society, 6(2), 243–289. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926595006002006[retrieved:10.11.2022]
van Leeuwen, T. (1995). The representation of social actors. In C. R. Caldas-Coulthard & M. Coulthard (Eds.), Texts and Practices (pp. 32–70). Routledge.
Véronique, M. (2008). Metaphors, mini-narratives and Foucauldian discourse theory. In T. Carver & J. Pikalo (Eds.), Political Language and metaphor (pp. 182–194). Routledge.
Wilson, J. (2005). “Political discourse”, in D. Schiffrin, D.Tannen & H.E. Hamilton (eds.) The Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 398-415. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470753460.ch21 [retrieved: 08.02.2023].
Wu, S., Hofman, J.M., Mason, W.A. & Watts, D.J. (2011). “Who says what to whom on Twitter”, Proceedings of the International World Wide Web Conference. 705-714. https://doi.org/10.1145/1963405.1963504 [retrieved: 10.11.2022].
Zappavigna, M. (2012). The discourse of Twitter and Social Media. Bloomsbury.
Funding
Open access funding provided by The Science, Technology & Innovation Funding Authority (STDF) in cooperation with The Egyptian Knowledge Bank (EKB).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
On behalf of all authors, the corresponding author states that there is no conflict of interest.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
About this article
Cite this article
Osama Ghoraba, M. Influential Spanish Politicians’ Discourse of Climate Change on Twitter: A Corpus-Assisted Discourse Study. Corpus Pragmatics 7, 181–240 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41701-023-00140-3
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41701-023-00140-3