NEW CRISES, NEW SOLUTIONS, NEW WORDS Lexical innovation in climate-related tweets

The book is a research monograph that explores the language of climate change as a multifaceted global issue, delving into its environmental, social, cultural, and political dimensions. It highlights the contentious nature of climate change discourse, shaped by the multitude and contrasting messages about its causes, effects, and solutions (Hulme, 2009). Since environmental issues can be considered a shared and ongoing problem, discussion and exchange of ideas between societies becomes an unending process. The dynamic nature of environmental concerns calls for the effective communication of new concepts and strategies. As the understanding of these issues evolves and new scenarios emerge, existing vocabulary may be insufficient to capture the complexity and nuances of our new perceptions and experiences. This language gap leads to the formation of new words that better define specific aspects of environmental phenomena. According to Mühlhäusler (2003), the creation of novel items reflects and shapes the collective awareness and attitudes towards the environment. Therefore, the continuous generation of new terminology is both a response to and a driver of the evolving discourse on environmental issues. Previous research has primarily focused on environmental politics and underlying ideologies without thoroughly investigating linguistic variations or their influence on new word formation in environmental discourse (Halliday, 1990; Hajer, 2002; Hajer & Versteeg, 2005). Recent studies have begun examining climate change communication on social media, particularly Twitter, focusing on linguistic variations and lexical creativity. However, most of these studies are synchronic or locally focused (Jang & Hart, 2015; Kirilenko & Stepchenkova, 2014; Kirilenko et al., 2015; Koteyko & Atanasova, 2016; Veltri & Atanasova, 2015). Using a corpus-assisted mixed-methods approach, this study provides an in-depth diachronic, diatopic, and diastratic analysis of climate change discussions on the social networking service Twitter (renamed X in 2023) among various stakeholders from the United States and Europe. Specifically, it investigates communication patterns, language use, and lexical innovations in 163,753 tweets over six years (2015-2020) among different types of users: climate activists, social movements, politicians, NGOs, and news sites. The study addresses two main research questions: how communication patterns and language use vary over time and how new words impact message framing. It hypothesizes that the number of tweets increases over time, that lexical innovations related to climate change are more frequent among social movements and NGOs, and that new lexical items have a stronger negative connotation throughout time. A quantitative analysis was first used to determine the frequency of terms, identify new lexical items, and reveal variation across time, places and type of communicative actors through statistical analyses. A qualitative approach was then adopted to annotate the polarity of new items, to identify frames of interpretation, and to determine differences and similarities between U.S. and European users, also in terms of political and social factors. Within the selected timeframe, the findings revealed an erratic trend in tweet frequency that appears to be influenced by social, political, and extreme weather events. The use of new negatively connotated lexical items referred to climate change, whereas positive lexical items often conveyed calls to action and protest. Thus, this research highlights how specific stakeholders create and disseminate language on social media to raise awareness, mobilize action, and attribute responsibility. This work contributes to a better understanding of how a non-conventional use of language on social media, such as Twitter, is able to shape climate change communication and offers a benchmark for future research on lexical innovation and their evolution into mainstream language. The book concludes with a section on potential pedagogical implications, proposing teaching approaches and learning strategies for English for Specific Purposes and professional communication courses. The section highlights how the use of authentic material, such as messages retrieved from social media platforms, may further motivate learners with different levels of language proficiency to deal with specific topics using concrete language samples. Hence, the analysis of linguistic and discursive aspects of climate-related matters, through interdisciplinary approaches, could contribute to increasing learners’ awareness regarding crucial topics such as climate change, climate justice, and sustainable development.