This paper examines Philip Larkin's poetry through an ecolinguistic lens, exploring his understated yet profound engagement with the natural world. While Larkin is often regarded as a disenchanted poet of modernity, his works reveal a sensitivity to non-human agency, particularly in relation to water. Through an analysis of poems such as Water and Cut Grass, the study applies transitivity analysis and metaphorical reversal to highlight the way that Larkin subtly reconfigures ecological relationships, attributing agency to natural elements. His vision, though not conventionally environmentalist, challenges capitalist-consumerist ideologies and aligns with contemporary ecolinguistic concerns about re-centering the non-human. Larkin's elemental spirituality – seen in his emphasis on water and light – suggests an alternative to traditional religious structures, positioning nature as a site of transcendence. This study contributes to ecolinguistic discourse by demonstrating how poetic language can reframe human-nature relations in ways that resonate with ecological thought.
The article explores the sense of placelessness in two collections of short fiction by Stuart Dybek: Childhood and Other Neighborhoods (1980) and The Coast of Chicago (1990). It examines the role of vagrants in "The Palatsky Man", "Chopin in Winter", "The Wake", "Sauerkraut Soup" and "Nighthawks", in comparison with the places occupied by other characters. By using Jacques Derrida's notion of hospitality as a discourse on space, the article explore the function of place in these stories in terms of the degree of exclusion of marginal populations and explore the dichotomies of place/placelessness and inclusion/exclusion. The places he describes in his stories create a dialectics of inclusion and exclusion, one that he represents by placing vagrants and immigrants in specific narrative scenarios. There are indications that immigrants want to enter the area of inclusion, whereas this drive is less clear cut in the case of vagrants.
This research aims to examine how hydro-climatic phenomena – specifically glacial melting and sea level rise – are discursively framed in contemporary Italian media. To address the thematic and lexical limitations of general-purpose corpora, a dedicated dataset was compiled, consisting of 3,040 articles published between 2022 and 2024 in The Post Internazionale. The analysis focuses on two editorial sections, Politica (Politics) and Ambiente (Environment), combining methods from corpus linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis to explore lexical patterns, rhetorical strategies, and discursive positioning. The study investigates how environmental meanings are constructed across these journalistic contexts, and how such representations reflect or resist dominant ideological frameworks. In doing so, it highlights the role of media language in shaping public understandings of climate change, and considers how institutional discourse may contribute to – or constrain – more critical engagement with ecological issues.
Over the past couple of decades, ecological and environmental topics have become established as relatively common subjects for discourse analytical linguistic research. However, alongside the rising interest in the discursive representation of various issues related to the current problems of the day, such as global warming, environmental pollution, ecological disasters and natural catastrophes, we have seen the emergence of the new discipline of ecolinguistics. In this article, we briefly outline some of the central concerns of the 'ecolinguistic' approach to language study, and provide an overview of the papers that are included in the special issue 'Encounters with water: An ecolinguistic perspective', pointing out the common themes and the various methodological points of departure. The text concludes by suggesting that the ecolinguistic dimension, which is relevant for the exploration of both the language system and the actual language use, is understood as one of the possible components of the broadly defined context in which any language-based communicative activity is grounded.
