Latest Trends in Linguistics
1. Introduction
Stories are the secret reservoir of values: change the stories that individuals or nations live by and you change the individuals and nations themselves.
(Ben Okri 1996: 21)
Stories bear tremendous creative power. Through them we coordinate human activity, focus attention and intention, define roles, identify what is important and even what is real.
(Charles Eisenstein 2011: 2)
-Language & Ecology
nature writing can inspire respect for the natural world in contrast to advertising that leads to damage to the environment
-How we think has an influence on how we act, so language can inspire us to destroy or protect the ecosystems that life depends on
-Ecolinguistics, then, is about critiquing forms of language that contribute to ecological destruction, and aiding in the search for new forms of language that inspire people to protect the natural world. This is a superficial explanation but at least starts to create connections in people’s minds between two areas of life – language and ecology – that are not so separate after all.
-Ecolinguistics is very much more than this though. First, there are a number of different approaches with very different aims, goals and methodologies. Second, the analysis goes far deeper than commenting on individual texts such as advertisements or nature books. Ecolinguistics can explore the more general patterns of language that influence how people both think about, and treat, the world
-It can investigate the stories we live by – mental models that influence behaviour and lie at the heart of the ecological challenges we are facing
-There are certain key stories about economic growth, about technological progress, about nature as an object to be used or conquered, about profit and success, that have profound implications for how we treat the systems that life depends on. As Thomas Berry (1988: 123) puts it:
We are in trouble just now because we don’t have a good story. We are between stories. The old story, the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it, is no longer effective. Yet we have not learned the new story.
-We have still not learned a new story
-The link between ecology and language is that how humans treat each other and the natural world is influenced by our thoughts, concepts, ideas, ideologies and worldviews, and these in turn are shaped through language. It is through language that economic systems are built, and when those systems are seen to lead to immense suffering and ecological destruction, it is through language that they are resisted and new forms of economy brought into being. It is through language that consumerist identities are built and lives orientated towards accumulation, and it is through language that consumerism is resisted and people are inspired to ‘be more rather than have more’. It is through language that the natural world is mentally reduced to objects or resources to be conquered, and it is through language that people can be encouraged to respect and care for the systems that support life. In critiquing the damaging social and ecological effects of financial structures, Berardi (2012: 157) states that:
Only an act of language can give us the ability to see and to create a new human condition, where we now only see barbarianism and violence. Only an act of language escaping the technical automatisms of financial capitalism will make possible the emergence of a new life form.
-Linguistics provides tools for analysing the texts that surround us in everyday life and shape the kind of society we belong to. These tools can help reveal the hidden stories that exist between the lines of the texts. Once revealed, the stories can be questioned from an ecological perspective: do they encourage people to destroy or protect the ecosystems that life depends on? If they are destructive then they need to be resisted, and if beneficial they need to be promoted.
-The role of this book is to bring together a range of theories from linguistics and cognitive science into a linguistic framework to reveal the stories we live by; to develop an ecological framework for judging those stories against; and to put the linguistic and ecological frameworks into action in analysing a wide range of texts from different areas of life
-This book is based on one key premise: that ecolinguistics can play a valuable role in exposing and questioning the stories we live by, and contribute to the search for new ones
THE STORIES WE LIVE BY:
-Growing inequality, climate change, biodiversity loss, alienation from nature and loss of community are bringing into question the fundamental stories that industrial societies are based on
-David Korten (2006: 248) describes four stories(1. ‘prosperity story,2.‘biblical story’,3. ‘security story’ & 4.‘secular meaning story) at the heart of western imperial civilisation which he claims have profound ecological implications. There is the ‘prosperity story’ which promotes worship of material acquisition and money, the ‘biblical story’ which focuses on the afterlife rather than the world around us, the ‘security story’ which builds up the military and police to protect relationships of domination, and the ‘secular meaning story’ which reduces life to matter and mechanism. These stories, he maintains, perpetuate injustice and lead to both alienation from life and environmental destruction.
-Chet Bowers (2014: 27) describes how the root metaphors of ‘individualism, progress, economism, and anthropocentrism have merged into a powerful process of conceptual and moral legitimation’. Stories such as these, he claims, carry forward ‘the deep assumptions of an ecologically unsustainable culture’. For Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine (2009) the most dangerous story that we live by is ‘the story of human centrality, of a species destined to be lord of all it surveys, unconfined by the limits that apply to other, lesser creatures’
the news reports that describe the ‘bad news’ about a drop in Christmas sales, or the ‘good news’ that airline profits are up, or the advertisements promising us that we will be better people if we purchase the unnecessary goods they are promoting. Underneath common ways of writing and speaking in industrial societies are stories about unlimited economic growth as being not just possible but the goal of society, of the accumulation of unnecessary goods as a path towards self-improvement, of progress and success defined narrowly in terms of technological innovation and profit, and of nature as something separate from humans, a mere stock of resources to be exploited.
To give an example of how a story can be told ‘between-the-lines’, consider the 2013 BBC documentary ‘What makes us human?’, summarised on the BBC website as: Professor Alice Roberts investigates exactly what makes us different from the animal kingdom. What is it that truly makes us human? (ML12 – see Appendix for reference).
Behind this phrasing are two stories. The first is that humans live outside the animal kingdom, i.e. that humans are not animals. The second is that what makes us human is to be discovered in our differences from other animals rather than our commonalities. In the documentary, Professor Roberts herself does not use the first story, but she does use the second: What is it about our bodies, our genes and our brains that sets us apart? What is it that truly makes us human? Michael has devised an experiment that he believes reveals a specific piece of behaviour that separates us from chimps, that defines us as a species, and truly makes us human (ML13 – transcribed extracts from ‘What makes us human?’).
Noam Chomsky (2006: 88), for instance, wrote: When we study human language, we are approaching what some might call the ‘human essence’, the distinctive qualities of mind that are, so far as we know, unique to man.(The definite article the in the ‘human essence’ leaves no space for qualities we share with other animals to also be considered part of our essence)
Plumwood (2007) strongly criticises this story: Arguably, the distinguishing feature of western culture, and perhaps also the chief mark of its ecological failure, is the idea that humankind is radically different and apart from the rest of nature and from other animals. This idea, sometimes called Human Exceptionalism, has allowed us to exploit nature and people more ruthlessly (some would say more efficiently) than other cultures, and our high-powered, destructive forms of life dominate the planet
-WHEN ecolinguists examine ideologies, metaphors, frames and a variety of other cognitive and linguistic phenomena, what they are doing is revealing and uncovering the stories that shape people’s lives and shape the society in which we live.
Midgley (2011: 1) calls stories in this sense the ‘myths we live by’. By myths she means ‘imaginative patterns, networks of powerful symbols that suggest particular ways of interpreting the world’. Indeed, Kingsnorth and Hine (2009) use the terms myth and story interchangeably: ‘We intend to challenge the stories which underpin our civilisation: the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality, and the myth of our separation from “nature”.’ Robertson (2014: 54) uses the term ‘paradigm’ in a similar sense to refer to ‘a fundamental framework for understanding the world, a coherent set of assumptions and concepts that defines a way of viewing reality’
-Stories are cognitive structures in the minds of individuals which influence how they perceive the world. Stories-we-live-by are stories in the minds of multiple individuals across a culture. Cognitive structures are mental models that exist in the minds of individuals – for example, a model of the world where humans are separate from and superior to other animals, or a model where humans are surrounded by an environment
-Importantly the stories-we-live-by influence how we act in the world – if nature is seen as a resource then we may be more likely to exploit it, or if economic growth is seen as the primary goal of politics then people’s wellbeing and the ecosystems which support life may be overlooked.
- the term ‘ecolinguistics’ has been used since at least the 1990s (Fill and Mühlhäusler 2001: 1)
-The multiplicity of approaches arises from different understandings of the concept of ‘ecology’, from a very broad concept of ‘the interaction of some things with other things’ to narrow concepts such as ‘related to environmentalism’.
-Steffensen and Fill (2014: 7) identify four different interpretations of ecology that lie behind the different approaches. The first approach sees language as existing in a symbolic ecology, where different languages interact with each other in a given location. The second approach sees language as part of a sociocultural ecology where it shapes societies and cultures. The third approach is concerned with cognitive ecology and how the cognitive capacity of organisms affects how they adapt to their environment. Finally, there is a natural ecology which is concerned with the relationship of language to its biological and physical environment. It is within this final form of ecology that Steffensen and Fill (2014: 9) ask the key question at the heart of this book: ‘Do linguistic patterns, literally, affect the survival and wellbeing of the human species as well as other species on Earth?’
-Ecology in this book, then, is very much the ecological science concept of the interaction of organisms with each other and their physical environment.
THE human ecology (Gare 2002) that is of interest, which can be defined as the interaction of humans with other humans, other organisms and the physical environment.
-This view of ecology alleviates the need to split ecology up into a ‘natural ecology’, as if humans were not part of the natural world, or a ‘symbolic ecology’, as if symbols interacted with each other in the same way that organisms do.
-There has been important work in Critical Discourse Analysis which exposes the role of language in promoting racism, sexism and oppressive power relations (e.g. van Dijk 2008; Fairclough 2014), and in cognitive linguistics, which examines both the general ‘metaphors we live by’ (Lakoff and Johnson 1980) and the cognitive frames that play such an important role in political life (Lakoff 2004). While these theories and frameworks tended in the past to focus exclusively on human relations with other humans, they can also be adapted and applied to wider ecological issues, as more recent studies have increasingly started to demonstrate (e.g. Alexander 2009; Nerlich 2010; Larson 2011; Milstein and Dickinson 2012).
- The ‘linguistics’ of the form of ecolinguistics described in this book uses a variety of linguistic theories to analyse patterns in language in an attempt to reveal the underlying stories-welive-by, as a step towards changing them
Ecosophy or ecophilosophy is a philosophy of ecological harmony or equilibrium. The term was coined by the French post-structuralist philosopher and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari and the Norwegian father of deep ecology, Arne Næss.
- Gavriely-Nuri (2012: 83) makes her framework explicit when she calls for a Cultural Critical Discourse Analysis based on ‘values, attitudes and behaviours based on the principles of freedom, justice and democracy, all human rights, tolerance and solidarity’
-. Democracy, justice and solidarity do not automatically lead to sustainable levels of consumption, and peace in a society that exceeds environmental limits will be short lived.
-The ecolinguist Jørgen Bang uses a philosophical framework similar to that of Gavriely-Nuri, but does include ecological consideration. For Bang (personal communication, July 2014), ecolinguistics is based on: contributing to a local and global culture in which (i) co-operation, (ii) sharing, (iii) democratic dialogue, (iv) peace and non-violence, (v) equality in every sphere of daily life, and (vi) ecological sustainability are the fundamental features and primary values
-Larson (2011: 10), in his ecolinguistic analysis of metaphor, uses a philosophical framework of ‘socioecological sustainability’ and considers ‘whether the metaphors we have chosen will help us on the path of sustainability or lead us further astray’. He describes his ethical vision of sustainability through statements such as the following: … we seek not just ecological sustainability, but a more encompassing socioecological sustainability. We want a sustainable relationship between humans and the natural world rather than a sustained ecological system without humans which, to many of us, would be a sign of failure … are the metaphors we choose fertile, or effective, for socioecological sustainability? (Larson 2011: 17)
Naess (1995) uses the term ecosophy (a shortening of ‘ecological philosophy’) to describe a set of philosophical principles which include ecological consideration. He expresses it like this: By an ecosophy I mean a philosophy of ecological harmony … openly normative it contains norms, rules, postulates, value priority announcements and hypotheses concerning the state of affairs … The details of an ecosophy will show many variations due to significant differences concerning not only the ‘facts’ of pollution, resources, population, etc. but also value priorities. (Naess 1995: 8)
-There are many possible schools of thought that can be drawn on in forming an ecosophy, and they tend to run along three spectra. The first spectrum is from anthropocentric (human centred) to ecocentric (centred on all life including humans). The second spectrum is from neoliberal at one end to either socialist, localist or anarchist at the other. The third spectrum is from optimistic to pessimistic. Interestingly, the three spectra broadly align with each other, so conservative neoliberal frameworks tend to be optimistic and anthropocentric, while politically radical approaches tend towards pessimism and ecocentrism.
-It is useful to give a brief outline of some philosophical perspectives:
It is useful to give a brief outline of some philosophical perspectives, to illustrate how the frameworks align along the spectra. At the most politically conservative end is ‘cornucopianism’. This philosophy considers that human ingenuity and ever advancing technology will overcome environmental and resource issues. Humans should therefore continue with and accelerate industrial progress for the sake of human (and only human) benefit (e.g. Lomborg 2001; Ridley 2010). Then there is a cluster of perspectives under the umbrella of ‘sustainable development’, which attempt to combine economic growth with environmental protection and social equity (e.g. Baker 2006). These vary from more conservative positions, where economic growth is the priority, to approaches which more fully consider social and ecological factors. Social ecology (e.g. Bookchin 1994, 2005) is a more politically radical perspective which sees the roots of ecological destruction as existing in oppressive social hierarchies. In this perspective, humans will continue dominating nature and treating it as a resource until they stop dominating each other and treating each other as resources. Ecofeminism (e.g. Adams and Gruen 2014) also locates the cause of ecological crisis in domination, but focuses on the parallels between the oppression of animals and the environment and men’s domination of women. One of the aims of ecofeminism is to change society so that the ecological sensitivity gained by women through their practical role in subsistence and community building is valued and used in rebuilding more ecological societies.
Deep ecology (e.g. Drengson and Inoue 1995) recognises the intrinsic worth of humans, plants, animals, forests and rivers, that is, their value beyond direct, short-term use for humans. Recognising worth in nature, it is argued, is likely to encourage people to protect and preserve the conditions that support all life, including human life. The Transition Movement (Hopkins 2008) is based on a philosophy of ‘resilience’ as a key goal, as both climate change and the depletion of oil lead to an inevitable decline in the ability of the earth to support human life. Transition is localist in encouraging communities to regain the bonds and skills to look after each other and fulfil their own needs outside of a turbulent and unreliable international economy. The Dark Mountain Project (Kingsnorth and Hine 2009) sees even the hope of resilience as overly optimistic, and aims at generating new stories for survivors to live by after the inevitable collapse of industrial civilisation. The aim of the Dark Mountain Project is to discover stories which do not repeat the same errors of the past and consider humans as part of the natural world rather than conquerors of it. Deep Green Resistance (McBay et al. 2011) sees industrial civilisation as evil due to the damage and suffering it causes both humans and other species. Rather than waiting for industrial civilisation to destroy itself, Deep Green Resistance aims to hasten its destruction through carefully planned sabotage. At the far other end of the spectrum there is the semi-serious Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT 2014), with a utilitarian philosophy that it would be better for one species (homo sapiens) to become extinct (voluntarily through a global decision not to have children) rather than the millions of species that humans are driving to extinction. This is radically ecocentric, and pessimistic since it views any continuation of human life as a threat to the ecosystems that support life
- Gary Snyder, ecocritic, poet and philosopher, for instance, has built a personal ecosophy which combines and extends social and deep ecology (Messersmith-Glavin 2012)
-Ecosophy in one word: Living!
Explanation Valuing living: The exclamation mark in Living! is normative, indicating ‘to be valued/celebrated/respected/affirmed’, and it applies to all species that are living. This is a value announcement but is based on the observation that beings value their lives and do whatever they can to continue living. The ‘valuing’ takes place in different ways: consciously, instinctively and almost (but not quite) mechanically, from a pedestrian watching carefully for cars, to a sparrow taking flight at the sound of a fox, or a snow buttercup following the arc of the sun to soak up life giving rays
Wellbeing: Living! is not the same as ‘being alive’ since there are conditions which reduce the ability to value living, such as extreme exploitation, enclosure in factory farms or illness due to chemical contamination. The goal is not just living in the sense of survival but living well, with high wellbeing. Although wellbeing applies to all species, high wellbeing for humans is a sine qua non, since no measure to address ecological issues that harms human interests is likely to be adopted
Now and the future: The temporal scope of Living! is not limited to the present, so includes the ability to live with high wellbeing in the present, in the future, and the ability of future generations to live and live well.
Care: While respect for the lives of all species is central, continued ‘living’ inevitably involves an exchange of life. There will therefore be those who we stop from living, and those whose lives we damage in order to continue our own lives and wellbeing. The ethical aspect of the ecosophy deals with this through empathy, regret and gratitude (i.e. care), rather than an attempt to preserve moral consistency by considering those we harm as inferior, worthless or just resources. Empathy implies awareness of impacts on others, regret implies minimising harm, and gratitude implies a duty to ‘give back’ something to the systems that support us
Environmental limits: If human consumption exceeds the ability of natural resources to replenish themselves then this damages the ability of ecological systems to support life (and living) into the future. Equally, if consumption leads to more waste than can be absorbed by ecosystems, the excess waste will prevent beings from living or living with high wellbeing. To keep within environmental limits an immediate and large-scale reduction of total global consumption is necessary
Social justice: Currently, large numbers of people do not have the resources to live, or to live with high wellbeing. As global consumption levels drop (either voluntarily or through resource exhaustion) resources will need to be redistributed from rich to poor if all are to live with high wellbeing
Resilience: Significant ecological destruction is already occurring and more is inevitable given the trajectory of industrialised societies. It is therefore necessary to adapt to environmental change, increase resilience to further changes, and find new forms of society as current forms unravel. This is necessary in order to allow the continuation of living with high wellbeing (as far as possible) even as the earth becomes less hospitable for life.
The ecosophy draws (a) from deep ecology in being ecocentric (giving consideration to other species as well as humans), although there is a pragmatic emphasis on human wellbeing; (b) from social ecology in being orientated towards social justice; (c) from sustainable development in considering future generations; and (d) from Transition and the Dark Mountain Project in recognising and responding to inevitable environmental change. The ethic of care is derived from feminist ethics (Peterson 2001: 133), and ‘respectful use’ of animals, plants and nature draws on Plumwood’s (2012: 81) ‘ecological animalism’. Respectful use acknowledges that while other beings and natural systems are a means for continuing human survival, they are also ends in themselves.
The organisation of this book may at first bear a resemblance to the ‘Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge’ (Borges 1999: 231). In Borges’s imagined tome, animals are divided up into various types including ‘those that belong to the emperor’, ‘embalmed ones’, ‘those that are trained’, ‘suckling pigs’, ‘mermaids’, ‘stray dogs’, and ‘those that tremble as if they were mad’. This is not a book about animals, but about stories. It divides these stories up into different types: there are stories shared by members of a group, stories which use one area of life to describe another, stories about what it means to be a particular kind of person, and stories about whether something is good or bad, true or false, worthy or unworthy of consideration. There are eight types of story in total, which this book labels as ideologies, framings, metaphors, evaluations, identities, convictions, erasure and salience. These are summarised:
ideology- a story of how the world is and should be which is shared by members of a group- discourses, i.e. clusters of linguistic features characteristically used by the group
framing -a story that uses a frame (a packet of knowledge about an area of life) to structure another area of life-trigger words which bring a frame to mind
metaphor (a type of framing)-a story that uses a frame to structure a distinct and clearly different area of life-trigger words which bring a specific and distinct frame to mind
evaluation -a story about whether an area of life is good or bad-appraisal patterns, i.e. patterns of language which represent an area of life positively or negatively
identity- a story about what it means to be a particular kind of person-forms of language which define the characteristics of certain kinds of people
conviction -a story about whether a particular description of the world is true, uncertain or false-facticity patterns, i.e. patterns of linguistic features which represent descriptions of the world as true, uncertain or false
erasure -a story that an area of life is unimportant or unworthy of consideration-patterns of language which fail to represent a particular area of life at all, or which background or distort it
salience- a story that an area of life is important and worthy of consideration-patterns of language which give prominence to an area of life
