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Part of
The Cultural Pragmatics of Danger: Cross-linguistic perspectives
Edited by Carsten Levisen and Zhengdao Ye
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 346] 2024
► pp. 158–174

Chapter 8
Planet in danger! Climate emotions in English

A cultural pragmatics study of eco-anxiety, grief and distress

ORCID logo | Griffith University

People can respond to the planet in danger through emotions. In English, some of the most common emotional reactions to the climate crisis have been labelled with terms such as eco-anxiety, climate grief and ecological distress. This chapter takes the popular, rather than academic, reception of these emotion terms based on a collection of English-language podcasts. As a cultural pragmatics study, its method is semantically-enhanced discourse studies, which draws on natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) approach. Through examination of popular discussions of climate emotions, which show some diversity of opinion, the chapter moves to put forward an emotion model for overarching relevant ecological feelings and an action model for a typical motivation of School Strikers. These models constitute two innovative representations arising from semantically-enhanced discourse studies. The chapter ends with some proposals for how to study the pragmatics of emotions and how to work with novel, often environmental, vocabulary for which fixed senses have not settled.

Keywords: cultural pragmatics, pragmatics of emotions, natural semantic metalanguage (NSM), climate emotions, eco-anxiety, ecological grief, ecological distress
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methodological frames
  • 3.In search of words
    • 3.1Reification
    • 3.2Experience-near, experience distant
    • 3.3Anxiety or grief
  • 4.An emotion model
  • 5.Action model for School Strikers
  • 6.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
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