A call for the environment: A bilingual corpus-driven analysis of creative language in online texts by WWF and Greenpeace

Since its development as a discipline in the 1980s, environmental communication has sought to inform and warn people about the threats and issues that concern nature and wildlife by providing an accurate representation of them. There are a variety of actors and media that have contributed to spread such communication and raise awareness about environmental issues, both on a local and a global level. In order to reach even lay people and to fulfil their persuasive purpose, environment texts have undergone a process of popularisation and have exploited every linguistic resource, including the most creative ones. This dissertation aims at investigating the use of creative solutions in environment texts published by two environmental organisations, namely, WWF and Greenpeace. This investigation was carried out by designing a comparable corpus, consisting of online texts in Italian, British English and American English found in the websites of such NGOs. The study focused on the titles and subheadings of those texts, which were classified and grouped according to the type of lexical creativity they contain. The analysis showed that only a minority of cases included traditional figures of speech and idiomatic expressions that maintained their original form and meaning, as the majority contained manipulations at the semantic, structural, or phonological level. These deformations concerned collocations, idioms, and even quotes of famous books, songs, films, and other cultural or intertextual references. However, the most used device in the corpus turned out to be wordplay, followed by the exploitation of the polysemy of words that is generated in a particular context. Overall, it was observed that what affects the choice towards a creative device rather than another is not the general topic but the specific content of that text.