Linguistic Remediation of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report in Twitter Discourse on Climate Change

Marina Niceforo

doi:10.6093/2035-8504/10561

Marina Niceforo University of Naples L’Orientale

DOI: https://doi.org/10.6093/2035-8504/10561

Keywords: remediation, climate change discourse, social media discourse analysis, computer-mediated discourse analysis, ecolinguistics, popularisation

Abstract

In the age of global environmental crisis, information about climate change is disseminated through a wide range of channels in a variety of textual genres, from scientific publications and normative texts to news, or blogs. Climate-related discourses available on social media offer valuable examples of remediation of technical-scientific information addressed to large groups of non-experts.

In line with the popularisation of scientific knowledge (Gotti 2014), the present study investigates the linguistic remediation of specialised concepts from the sixth IPCC report on climate change (released by the UN last February 28th, 2022) in a corpus of about 4200 tweets by international environmental organisations, institutions, and other public figures. The dataset, retrieved via web scraping tools, is analysed using qualitative analysis software (NVivo) to observe thematic and linguistic features of remediated discourse – in particular, about the four key terms and notions risk, vulnerability, adaptation, and resilience.

While computer-mediated discourse analysis (Herring 2004) and ecolinguistics (Stibbe 2015) provide the theoretical framework for this study, risk communication (Russo 2018, Bevitori and Johnson 2022) and appraisal theory (Martin and White 2005) enable considerations of expressive language and effective communication, authors’ critical positioning, circulation of scientific information, and possible positive impact of remediated discourses on people’s environmental attitudes and behaviours.

Author Biography

Marina Niceforo, University of Naples L’Orientale

Marina Niceforo is a Research Fellow in English Language and Translation at the University of Naples L’Orientale. She received a PhD in European Languages and Specialised Terminology from the University of Naples Parthenope. Her major research interests include Critical Discourse Analysis of environmental and sustainability discourses, gender and cultural issues, and power dynamics in institutional, corporate and social media communication. She has recently worked as a visiting research fellow at the University of Portsmouth (UK).