This paper examines how the terms climate change and climate crisis and their French and Estonian equivalents are used in large language corpora, focusing on their collocational patterns, semantic profiles, and implied framings. The analysis focuses on three types of relations: adjectival modifiers, broader lexical co-occurrences, and verbal collocations. The results show that across the three language corpora, the term climate change is predominantly associated with institutional and technocratic contexts and with verbs and nouns referring to structured intervention, while climate crisis is associated with more urgent and affective vocabulary and is more closely linked to activist contexts. Beyond the shared metaphor of fighting the crisis, the data also point to the relevance of the metaphor of time in motion, particularly in climate change discourses.
When news coverage says that emissions drive warming or climate change displaces communities, the phrasing sounds neutral while it subtly writes the people behind it out of the story. The processes become the actors, while the polluters and decision-makers responsible for the harm slip out of view. Grammatically, this works by placing an abstraction in the subject position of an active verb, so that a process appears to act on its own. This article calls that effect “hypostatization”. The study examines how it shapes the language of climate journalism in the contemporary Anglo-American press. Drawing on interviews with six environmental journalists and corpus analysis of their published work alongside major outlets (NPR, CNN, The Conversation, and The New York Times), it traces how scientific vocabulary takes on evaluative weight as it enters public discourse and why even journalists who favor urgent terms like climate crisis keep using the established climate change so heavily. The analysis shows that this obliteration of responsibility happens mostly through ordinary, literal grammar rather than vivid metaphor: abstractions take the agent’s role through plain causative verbs far more often than figurative ones. Metaphor works alongside it as a parallel resource, since both draw on the same underlying sense of causes as forces, while softer terms like clean energy and carbon credits further dilute responsibility and emphasize technological fixes. By tracing how grammar, not just word choice, quietly redistributes agency and responsibility, the study contributes to ecolinguistics and critical discourse research.
The study investigates the rapidly expanding lexicon of carbon-related terminology in contemporary English through the lens of corpus-assisted ecolinguistics. Drawing on data from the NOW Corpus (2010-2025), a dataset of 562 carbon-related terms (mostly carbon + noun compounds) was compiled, comprising both established policy terms and novel creative items that are largely restricted to media and advocacy discourse. Frequency, collocation and concordance analyses were applied to reveal the major discursive patterns of their use throughout the period, with 12 distinct framings of carbon being identified as a result. It is demonstrated that since the late 2010s, carbon terminology has been restructured around balancing, offsetting, and future neutrality rather than absolute reduction, which raises concerns from an ecolinguistic perspective. The rapid proliferation of market-based framing (positioning carbon as a commodity) is also seen as discursively destructive due to its promotion of endless growth narratives. Special attention is paid to the critical metaframing of carbon, encompassing metaphorical terms that point out shortcomings in implemented climate solutions (e.g., carbon tunnel vision, carbon colonialism) and the deep embedding of fossil fuels within existing socioeconomic structures (e.g., carbon capitalism, carbon bubble). Overall, the inquiry provides an insight into the vastly creative ways in which carbon is construed in the media, revealing the competing – and potentially confusing – narratives of responsibility, control and action in relation to climate change. The paper concludes by calling for greater terminological coherence in climate communication and for further psycholinguistic and cross-cultural research into the social effects of carbon framing as the dominant focus of climate discourse.
This paper investigates the prominence and political reframing of metaphors in French climate policy discourse, with a focus on Emmanuel Macron’s promotion of his energy sobriety plan (sobriété énergétique) since 2022. While earlier French climate rhetoric often relied on well-established war and combat metaphors (Augé [2023]), Macron has introduced a distinct lexicon emphasising sobriety (sobriété). This term reframes climate action away from narratives of sacrifice and restriction toward metaphors of moderation, balance, and collective discipline, while simultaneously embedding ecological policy within the broader imaginaries of sovereignty and national resilience. Drawing on ecolinguistics (Stibbe [2021]) and Lakoff & Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory, the analysis explores how sobriété functions as a metaphorical extension from the moral domain (temperance, restraint) into the energy sector, where it connotes both necessity in times of crisis (energy shortages, war in Ukraine) and virtue in long-term ecological transition. The study examines presidential speeches, government communications, and official reports (2022–2024), highlighting the argumentative potential of these metaphors: they soften the perception of constraint by casting reduced consumption as ethical and civic, while legitimising state-led planning as pragmatic rather than coercive. At the same time, the paper discusses the possible ambivalence of such metaphorical framing, which may, in certain configurations, contribute to individualising responsibility for collective ecological challenges. Finally, the analysis situates this metaphor within a multilingual context, asking how metaphors like sobriété, which may lack direct English equivalents (Mallard, 2024), challenge the European circulation of climate terminology. By tracing the use of these metaphorical repertoires, the paper argues that Macron’s discourse exemplifies how political actors strategically reshape climate lexicon to reconcile ecological urgency with cultural values of modernity, sovereignty, and collective endurance.
Against a backdrop of increasing environmental pressures and persistent social resistance to the actions required to address them (Hamelin [2025]), this article examines the evolution of representations of climate action in the French press between 2008 and 2024 through an approach combining textual terminology and neology. Drawing on a diachronic corpus of more than two million words, consisting of four major French daily newspapers (Le Monde, Libération, Le Figaro, and Les Échos), the study aims to identify terms denoting forms of climate action, trace the evolution and distribution of the semantic categories they index, and assess the role of neologisms in the conceptual renewal of the field. A multi-stage filtering procedure based on term extraction (Picton [2009]; Drouin [2003]), the analysis of knowledge-rich contexts (Meyer [2001]), and diachronic criteria enabled the identification of 138 neologisms. The findings reveal a predominance of mitigation strategies among the identified terms and neologisms, particularly those related to the energy transition, as well as a significant rise in adaptation and sufficiency-oriented approaches in recent years. A qualitative analysis of several classes of neologisms shows that their emergence does not systematically correspond to the appearance of new referents. Rather, it may reflect the increasing conceptual structuring of certain categories of tools (e.g., renewable energy technologies, carbon capture and storage), or the addition of a normative and incentive-oriented dimension to pre-existing terms.
