Metonymy in Online Discourse on Facebook by Greenpeace Australia Pacific

Abstract

Greenpeace Australia Pacific is an “independent campaigning organization that uses peaceful protest and creative confrontation to expose global environmental problems” (Greenpeace Australia Pacific, 2023), such as the issues of climate change and environmental sustainability. The aforementioned problems are often communicated by Greenpeace Australia Pacific to its stakeholders and the general public via online means, for instance, Facebook. Given that currently there is insufficient research that investigates Greenpeace Australia Pacific’s online discourse on Facebook, this article presents a mixed-methods study that aims to explore how metonymy is used in disseminating environmental and climate change-related issues by Greenpeace Australia Pacific. In order to do so, the study involves a corpus of status updates that are found on Greenpeace Australia Pacific’ official Facebook page. The corpus is searched manually for the presence of metonymy and the types of metonymic mappings. The results of the qualitative analysis indicate that there are the following metonymic mappings in the corpus: “from a fossil fuel corporation to a polluter”, “from the name of the corporation to its actions”, “from the name of the country to the country’s government”, “from the name of the environmental organisation to its actions”, and “from the name of the vessel to its actions”. Thereafter, a quantitative analysis of the corpus is carried out in order to calculate the most frequent types of metonymic mappings. The results indicate that the metonymic mapping “from the name of the corporation to its actions” is the most frequent in the corpus, whose occurrence is concomitant with multimodality. These findings and their discussion are further presented in the article.