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SAMKUL-Samfunnsutviklingens kulturell

Changing Nature. A lexical and argumentative analysis of public debates on nature (1998-2017)

Alternative title: Natur i endring? En leksikalsk og argumentativ analyse av offentlige debatter om naturen (1988-2017)

Awarded: NOK 8.9 mill.

Previous research suggests that recent decades have seen a fundamental shift in our understanding of nature, of the relations between humans and nature, and of why nature is valuable, and that this has been accompanied by an increased importance attributed to expert knowledge in public debates about nature. This is reflected in current debates on anthropogenic climate change, mass extinction of species (biodiversity) and the concept of the 'anthropocene era', that all encompass the basic idea that humans transform the natural systems in a fundamental way. How are these changes reflected in the language we use to talk about nature, the arguments we use to decide on how to handle environmental issues, and in the types of expert knowledge are considered legitimate and relevant? This project has sought new knowledge on these processes by studying changes in public debates on nature in the time period 1998-2017, with an analytical focus on terminology, language variation and argumentation. We have used various data tools for quantitative and qualitative analysis of digital text collections (corpora), which cover large amounts of data from parliamentary debates, popular scientific outlets and the news media. In order to do this, it was necessary to develop new data sets (corpora) to be able to examine larger aspects of the public debates on nature and the environment. The corpora will be made available to other researchers. In addition, we compare debates about nature as a limit to economic growth in the Norwegian media with corresponding materials from France, to see if nature is portrayed differently in the two countries. Overall, the project will provide both a broad and in-depth analysis of how nature is portrayed and valued by the Norwegian public in the relevant period. In the first part of the project period, we focused on constructing the corpora we have used in the project. The first corpus is the Naturen corpus, which contains texts from the popular science journal Naturen, Norway's oldest popular science journal which was first published in 1877. In addition, the project has created a corpus of all the NOUs (Officail Norwegian Reportsd) published in the time period 1998- 2018. Both of these corpora will be made available to other researchers and the general public under the CC-BY license. In the first part of the project period, we used this material to investigate term formation in the field of nature and the environment, and to what extent terminology formed in a specialized genre such as the NOUs spreads to a wider public, both in the news media and in parliamentary debates. In the first part of the project period, we also investigated how nature is portrayed when people talk about climate change. For this we used survey data from the Norwegian Citizens' Panel and the results indicate that the relationship with nature can be an important motivator for lifestyle changes in the face of climate change. We have also collaborated with the French project partners at the Université de Bordeaux. The French partners have collected interview data related to controversies around mining development in order to analyze conflicts around natural diversity and nature conservation. Together with the French project partners, we have also investigated how different ethical perspectives are discussed in the nature and environmental debates we have seen. In the last part of the project period, we have focused on debates about climate change that have taken place in the Storting in the period 1998-2018. We have seen the use of different "climate words" such as 'carbon', 'CO2' and 'greenhouse gas' help to express different understandings of the climate change issue. We have also investigated how this knowledge can be used to teach sustainability issues in school. Furthermore, we have worked on an overview of new words in the fields of nature and the environment in the period 1998-2018, based on four corpora/datasets (Storting debates, NOUs in the period, forskning.no and the journal Naturen). Finally, we have also analyzed growth criticism related to nature in the French and Norwegian media. Overall, the project has, over the entire project period, resulted in three corpora/datasets that are made openly available. We have examined debates about nature and the environment in two popular science publications (forskning.no and Naturen), in political documents (NOUs) and in the parliamentary debates and we have examined the spread, in the form of new words and terminology, to a wider public in the form of the news media. The combined results are presented in a monograph to be published in 2024.

The project provides insights on the linguistic representation ‘nature’ in public debates in Norway in the time period 1998-2018 through an analysis of emerging terminology in five text corpora and data sets representative of parliamentary debates, popular science outlets and newspapers. The project shows that new terms emerge in specialized corpora and to some extent spread to the newspapers and thus to the general public. However, early half of new terms are not taken up in wider public discourse. Thus, the project contributes with new knowledge about the role of expert knowledge in public debates about issues related to nature and the environment. The results also show thematic clustering where the topics of climate and biodiversity are prevalent over the period, and that in some cases, different new terms correspond to different conceptualisations of environmental topics. In this way, the project has added to existing knowledge about environmental communication in Norwegian, which is essential for public deliberation about these phenomena. Moreover, the project adds to language planning initiatives in Norway, through the analyses of terminology and specialized neology in Norwegian. Specifically, the development of new digital language resources contributes in this respect.

Previous research suggests that recent decades have seen a fundamental shift in our understanding of nature, of the relations between humans and nature, and of why nature is valuable, and that this has been accompanied by an increased importance attributed to expert knowledge. This is reflected in current debates on anthropogenic climate change, mass extinction of species (biodiversity) and the concept of the 'anthropocene era', that all encompass the basic idea that humans transform the natural systems in a fundamental way. How are these changes reflected in the language we use to talk about nature, the arguments we use to decide on how to handle environmental issues, and what types of expert knowledge are considered legitimate and relevant? This project will provide new knowledge on these processes by studying changes in public debates on nature in the time period 1998-2017, with an analytical focus on terminology, language variation and argumentation. The project will apply a set of tools for quantitative and qualitative analysis of four corpora, covering a large data material from Parliamentary debates, popular science outlets and Norwegian newspapers. The project combines theoretical and methodological resources from corpus linguistic and sociology: a corpus-based study of terminology and specialized neology in political and popular science discourses; an argumentative analysis of the valuation of nature in Parliamentary discourse; and an international contrast case, viz. that of parliamentary debates in France, in order to gauge the specificities of the Norwegian vs. the French contexts.

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SAMKUL-Samfunnsutviklingens kulturell