A critical analysis of women’s and men’s public discourse on climate change

Ecolinguistics is a fairly recent branch of linguistics which intends to highlight the link between the language of a community and the ecosystem (both natural and cultural) in which it lives, that can differ and vary according to cultural features. This dissertation aims to carry out a contrastive analysis of men’s and women’s discourse on environmental issues, focusing the differences and similarities in behaviour, contents, and lexical choices. The dissertation is divided into four chapters. In the first one, the topic of ecolinguistics will be introduced, including the discourse of ecological issues and how these topics are exposed in public events. Then, it will present the history of activism from the beginning to nowadays and the most important aspects of critical discourse analysis. In the second chapter, we will focus about the speakers’ attitudes, focusing on the discourse with beneficial intentions and on the analysis of gendered language, both in relation to masculinity features and in feminine ones. The third chapter explores the corpus created by using men’s and women’s speeches, and the description of their characteristics in terms of lexical and textual choices. This chapter will also expose both the data of the analysis and the methods through which it has been carried out. The fourth chapter is devoted to the contrastive analysis: first, the selected texts extracted from conferences are described. Then, the texts are compared to analyse differences and similarities. Finally, the analysis is carried out by focusing on lexical and morphosyntactic aspects, as well as some attitudinal peculiarities identified in men and women during their speeches’ presentation. This study on ecolinguistics tries to critically analyse all written and oral discourses that are produced by a community who cares about environment. In this analysis, not only are the structural features of discourses considered, but also the producers of these discourses. The aim is to explore possible differences between the expressions of women’s and men’s attitudes towards climate change.