Tracing the evolution of Sustainability Discourse: a diachronic corpus-based analysis of Sustainability, Social Responsibility and Corporate Citizenship

As environmental, social and economic issues have increasingly become some of the most widely discussed topics both in public discourse and scientific communication, linguistic research began to delve into exploring the role and patterns of language employed in sustainability discourse. This thesis provides a diachronic corpus-based analysis of the language used in three specific academic journals, focusing on detecting and investigating potential differences of linguistic features over a ten-year period (2014-2024). The focus is set on three key concepts: sustainability, social responsibility and corporate citizenship. Through a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses, this study aims at tracing the evolution of the key-terms' linguistic patterns and intends to explore the evaluative approach to sustainability discourse and its core themes, concluding with an insightful overview of contemporary framing of such topics in corporate communication.