Climate change discourse : a cognitive linguistic study

Abstract EN

Climate change and its destructive impacts have been highlighted in several international meetings around the world.

It is believed that this global challenge is pictured differently in the political and scientific discourses.

This paper attempts to fill in this gap through investigating the conceptual metaphor in selected political and scientific speeches.

It aims at uncovering the ideologies behind using metaphorical expressions.

The study adopts Lakoff and Johnson's (2003) conceptual metaphor in analyzing the speeches of the president Xi Jinping and Barack Obama's about climate change in COP 21 in 2015.

The study also investigates metaphor in two scientific speeches about climate change.

Those speeches belong to Judith Curry and Geoff Summerhayes.

It is concluded that the presidents emphasize the use of metaphor to show their achievement and to indicate that they are the decision makers in the world.

It is found that the scientists use movement metaphor and sport metaphor more than the other kinds of metaphor.

This shows that their main intention is to facilitate the understanding of the complex issues in the notion of climate change and try to make this notion easily comprehensible by the audience.

(192 words)