The Syntax of Climate Change: Syntactic Means in the Construction of Greta Thunberg’s Community Identity on Facebook

Abstract

"The Syntax of Climate Change: Syntactic Means in the Construction of Greta Thunberg’s Community Identity on Facebook. It is argued that the identity of an online community (e.g., a Facebook community) is manifested by linguistic devices, such as syntactic means (Androutsopoulos 2015; Blumenfeld-Jones 2022; Kapranov 2019). This contention is explored in the study that is further presented and discussed in the article. The study seeks to identify syntactic means, in particular dependent clauses, which are involved in the construction of Greta Thunberg’s community identity on Facebook. Greta Thunberg, a famous climate change activist from Sweden, has a public account on Facebook that is followed by a substantial number of Facebook users, who, presumably, share her views on climate change, sustainability, and other environmental issues. It is assumed in the study that Greta Thunberg’s status updates on her public Facebook account could be characterised by syntactic means that facilitate the construction of the climate activists’ community identity. In order to verify the assumption, a corpus of Greta Thunberg’s status updates on Facebook was collected and analysed by the software program L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer (Lu 2010). The computer-assisted analysis was supplemented by a manual procedure of identifying the types of dependent clauses in the corpus. The results of the corpus analysis revealed that Greta Thunberg’s community construction on Facebook was facilitated by such syntactic means as dependent clauses, in particular non-finite, adverbial, and relative clauses. The findings were further discussed in the article through the lens of the construction of community identity. Keywords: climate change, dependent clauses, Facebook, Greta Thunberg, identity, online community, syntactic means "

Modal Verbs in English-Medium Research Articles on the Issue of Climate Change and Health

“…(Carrió Pastor, 2012, p. 128) This finding is reflective of the argument that the use of modal verbs in RAs differs between the cohorts of NNE academic writers and their English L1 counterparts (Yagız & Demir, 2014). At the same time, the prior studies (Gabrielatos & McEnery, 2005;Kapranov, 2022b) indicate that the differences between the cohorts of NNS and English L1 academic writers are not that substantial, at least, as far as the frequency of the occurrence of could, might, and would is concerned. In particular, the literature reports that there are no statistically significant differences associated with the frequencies of the central modal verbs in the RA abstracts in applied linguistics that are published in scientific peer-reviewed journals in the Outer and Inner Circles of English (Kapranov, 2022b, p. 26) As far as the frequency and distribution of the modal verb would is concerned, there are seem to be cross-disciplinary similarities that are not dependent on whether or not an academic writer is an English L1 speaker.…”

“…First of all, it should be mentioned that the presence of the most frequent modal verbs can and may supports the prior literature (Carrió Pastor, 2012;Huschová, 2015;Piqué, Posteguillo, & Andreu-Besó, 2001, p. 216), which posits that these modals are considered to be among the most frequent modal verbs in RAs in a range of academic disciplines. For instance, both can and may have been found among the most frequent modal verbs in RAs in linguistics and discourse studies (Kapranov, 2022b). In addition, it should be observed that the modal verb can is deemed to be a rather frequent modal verb in other types of discourses in the English language (Quirk, Svartvik, & Leech, 1985).…”

“…As previously mentioned in the introduction, modal verbs as a discursive means in academic discourse attract a considerable amount of scholarly attention (Fløttum, 2010;Huschová, 2015;Kapranov, 2022b). There seems to be a growing body of studies that are dedicated to investigating the role of modal verbs in RAs (Carrió Pastor, 2012;Gabrielatos & McEnery, 2005;Huschová, 2015;Kapranov, 2023b;Millán, 2008;Özcelik, 2023;Piqué, Posteguillo, & Andreu-Besó, 2001;Yagız & Demir, 2014).…”

“…The issue of climate change continues to represent an ongoing challenge (Kapranov, 2022a(Kapranov, , 2023aLofthouse & Herzberg, 2023), which is characterised by a wide range of profound repercussions that involve corporate, societal, and health-related aspects (Agache et al, 2022;Kapranov, 2015;Paz et al, 2016). In terms of the intersection between the issue of climate change and health, the literature points out to "the varied and substantial effects of climate change on human health and wellbeing" (Kotcher et al, 2021, p. 316).…”

Modal Verbs in Sustainability Reports by the University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford

“…The frequency and pragmatic roles of the central modal verbs in the study could contribute to investigating sustainability discourse by the leading British HEIs. The discourse of sustainability by UC and UO, inclusive of the use of the central modal verbs, could serve as an index of the best practices of sustainability reporting (Kapranov 2022c).…”