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In:Thinking Politically: Cognitive linguistic insights into political discourse
Edited by Anastasios Vogiatzis
[Figurative Thought and Language 22] 2027
► pp. 173–198

Chapter 8
Talking about talking about the climate crisis

Figurative strategies for difficult conversations

 | Tilburg University
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
Abstract
Human-driven ecological crises contain a great deal of irony. The extraction and overconsumption of natural resources is justified as a means of improving human welfare, even when these practices ultimately degrade the systems on which human welfare depends. Using data from 11 interviews with climate-concerned adults, I look at the role of irony in everyday climate communication. Irony appeared as a form of talk (communicative irony), the subject of talk (in descriptions of situational irony), and as a disposition (in describing disconnections between thoughts and actions). I argue that a multi-dimensional approach to irony can help to better understand why individuals often fail to act according to their beliefs, and how figurative tools like irony may help to overcome this theory-action gap. This work also points toward how linguistic approaches to irony may benefit from the incorporation of disposition when analyzing the motivations and impacts of irony in political discourse.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Irony in post-ecologism
    • 2.2Forms of irony
    • 2.3Irony as a coping mechanism
    • 2.4Metacommunication
  • 3.Data and methodology
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Interview format
    • 3.3Reporting
  • 4.Findings
    • 4.1Irony as communicative practice
    • 4.2Situational irony as focus
    • 4.3Dispositional irony as cognitive practice
    • 4.4Imagining with or through irony
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Conflicts of interest
  • Ethical review
  • Data availability
  • Author queries
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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