Language and Dialogue - Current Issue

This paper concentrates on relative communicative transparency and effective corporate communication about sustainability — primarily, the planet — on Gap Inc. (https://www.gapinc.com/en-us/) and House of Hermès (https://www.hermes.com/us/en/). Integrating the lenses of usability research (NN/g), multimodal analysis (Bateman 2014; Kress and Van Leuween 2020) and models of interaction in writing (Hyland 2005a, 2005b), the study suggests that Gap Inc. makes more effective decisions in the direction of communicative transparency. While adhering more strictly to principles of layout and user interface design, it offers more comprehensive and more readable content. Regarding user involvement and engagement, only Gap Inc. combines subjective naturalist images, also dynamic images that make a strong impression, with a preference for interactional metadiscourse and 1st-person pronouns in the written text.

The study explores dialogical framing as an engagement device in the two genres of corporate reports and corporate websites, by focusing on the nature and extent of dialogicity between companies and stakeholders, crucial to corporate strategies. Today investors and stakeholders increasingly demand greater transparency in accounting for long-term climate risks and opportunities, consequently companies need to rapidly adjust to the global ‘energy transition’, i.e. the shift from fossil-based energy towards renewable energy sources. For this purpose, the study seeks to identify how firms frame their energy transition plans, through dialogical engagement. To do this, three sub-corpora of selected texts were created from two pharmaceutical company websites, which were then comparatively analysed adopting corpus retrieval principles of analysis.

The aim of this study is to provide an overview of the perspectives of various stakeholders involved in climate change discourse within the financial sector. This paper focuses on sustainability and analyzes a corpus of approximately 30,000 words derived from the sustainability reports of four of the top 100 banks, as identified in the 2022 Standard and Poor’s ranking. The study utilizes corpus analysis tools to identify metadiscursive interactional features of self-mention (Hyland, 2005) and references to stakeholders, highlighting how these banks position themselves and engage with stakeholders in discussions related to climate change. It contributes to the literature on financial discourse and climate change and offers insights for companies seeking financial support by aligning their applications with bank narratives.

The multifaceted character of environmental discourse becomes evident on social media, where non-governmental organisations (NGOs) engage in public environmental discourses. Focused on X/Twitter for environmental purposes, this paper investigates engagement as an interpersonal phenomenon comprising two dimensions: self-presentation and audience projection. It qualitatively and quantitatively analyses 100 X/Twitter posts from WWF and Greenpeace (50 per account) with the tool NVivo 14. Findings reveal how the NGOs rely on verbal (self-mentions, lexical items) and non-verbal resources (emoji and multimedia elements) to present themselves to their audience, whilst exploiting verbal resources (second-person pronouns and directives) to construct their audience. Results underscore how NGOs leverage X/Twitter to assert their own legitimacy and that of their audience as integral members of the environmentalist community.

This study investigates metaphorical patterns in news discourses on COP27 in the New York Times and China Daily and aims to explore how metaphors are used to negotiate responsibility and commitments to climate change. News discourse plays a crucial role in shaping real-world events and reporting on the Conferences of the Parties (COP) on climate change is therefore crucial for fostering transparency in international climate politics (Gupta 2010). The results show how metaphors are used as argumentative devices, allowing for indirect comparisons that can be extended, reversed, and twisted (A’Beckett 2012). Responsibilities are metaphorically attributed in COP27 reports and reveal how the newspapers dialogically modify metaphorical frames (e.g., fight), with different countries playing various roles in the frame (e.g., victims or culprits).

Scholars and scientists increasingly promote collaboration, accessibility and information sharing through digital media. One such communicative scenario for scientific dissemination is Ask an Expert practices, where specialised knowledge of societal relevance is exchanged between expert and non-expert users. Focusing on the discourse of climate change and environmental sustainability, this paper analyses a corpus of 80 texts from the Ask an Expert webpage of the MIT Climate Portal by looking into dialogic mechanisms shaping the interaction among users. Insights are gained into interactional metadiscourse categories, specifically attitude and engagement markers, which characterise experts’ knowledge construction and scientific dissemination in Ask an Expert texts to cater for the needs and expectations of the general public in the field of environmental sciences.

The notion of dialogism has been widely explored in both discourse and argumentation studies. Through a combination of these two approaches, dialogism reveals its crucial role as a strategy functional to the positioning of the arguer, determined in contrast with the adversary. The paper investigates this aspect of dialogism, starting from the assumption that both dialogicity and argumentation are pervasive in discourse, and exploring the notion of interdiscourse. The discussion then focuses on polemic discourse, characterized by the impossibility of constructing a common ground, and on dialogic inversion as a strategy entailing the reinterpretation in one’s own terms of concepts and values typical of the adversary. The theoretical points are applied to the analysis of two different examples concerning typical issues of environmental discourse: the formula sustainable development, which belongs to the core lexicon of environmental policies and has been subject to different interpretations and evaluations; the neologism warmist, coined in opposition to denialist and conveying a context of contraposition between two incompatible viewpoints.