Climate Change. Tragic and comic apocalypse in environmental discourse on Social Media

Seminar paper from the year 2023 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, http://www.uni-jena.de/ (Department of English and American Studies), course: Text & Discourse Linguistics, language: English, abstract: This paper delves into the highly debated topic of climate change and its communication across social media, particularly on the platform X (formerly Twitter). Recognizing the profound global implications of climate change discourse, the study focuses on linguistic analysis at the lexical level, examining semantic patterns in environmental discourse. The goal is to identify distinctive language devices, including lexemes, phrases, clauses, figures of speech, and idiomatic expressions, and link them to the discourse categories of tragic and comic apocalypse in environmental discourse as defined by Foust and O'Shannon. The analysis involves closely examining selected Tweets from the database, aiming to categorize them based on these discourse frames. The paper outlines the methodology, defines discourse framing and environmental discourse categories, and concludes with a summary of findings and an outlook on communication modalities in the current discourse about climate change on social media.