Revisiting Halliday (1990): The role of linguistics in the study of the discourse of sustainability and how language shapes reality

Abstract

<p>Three decades since Halliday (1990) presented a paper to AILA in Greece entitled <em>New ways of meaning: a challenge to applied linguistics</em> and introducing the notion of an ecological study of language, “ecolinguistics” has been established and recognized as a field of research and activity, drawing centrally on Halliday (1990). But is his challenge being met outside the academic community? In this two-part talk, we revisit the challenge and mission envisaged by Halliday. In the first part of the talk, Prof. Matthiessen will discuss the questions, “What is the role of linguistics in the study of the discourse of sustainability?” and “How does language shape reality?”, covering Halliday’s notion of appliable linguistics — <strong><em>appliability</em></strong> (cf. Matthiessen, 2014), and for us as academics, his emphasis on <strong>social accountability</strong> (cf. Matthiessen, 2012); in the second part, Dr. Law will attempt to answer the questions, “What has changed in climate talk in the last decade?” and if we, linguists and language educations, want to save our planet, “What still needs to be done?”. We adopt both an appliable linguistics approach and a corpus-driven systemic functional linguistics approach to investigate the questions in a wide range of registers where environmental issues are being processed semiotically and opinions are being formed, including examples from political discourse, news media, social media, and late-night talk shows on topics surrounding climate change, renewable energy, wildlife conservation and extinction, and economic inequality. We also pay attention to texts likely to be influential in the life of children and their gradual construal of their own world views with associated value systems (cf. Matthiessen, 2015). This provides a snapshot of the language use by the media outlets in construing climate talk in the 2010s. Alternative words to approach climate talk in the 2020s will be discussed.</p><p><strong>References</strong><br></p><p>Halliday, M.A.K. (1990). New ways of analysing meaning: A challenge to applied linguistics. <em>Journal of Applied Linguistics</em>, <em>6</em>, 7-36.<br></p><p>Matthiessen, C. M.I.M. (2012). Systemic Functional Linguistics as appliable linguistics: social accountability and critical approaches. <em>D.E.L.T.A. (Revista de Documentação de Estudos em Lingüística Teórica e Aplicada)</em>, <em>28</em>, 437-471.<br></p><p>Matthiessen, C. M.I.M. (2014). Appliable discourse analysis. In F. Yan & J. J. Webster (Eds), <em>Developing systemic functional linguistics : theory and application</em> (pp. 135-205). Equinox.</p><p>Matthiessen, C. M.I.M. (2015). Subliminal construal of world order clause by clause: hierarchy of control in Noah’s Ark. <em>Linguistics and the Human Sciences</em>, <em>11</em> (2-3), 250–283. https://doi.org/10.1558/lhs.34710</p>