Ecolinguistics and Literature

Mainstream media, as evidenced in both the BBC and environmentalist texts, shows a marked frequency of clauses that either marginalise nature, or treat it as affected by humans, or only worth notice when it negatively impacts human activities. But counter discourses, especially literary, can represent an alternative view of the natural world, and be a focus of positive discourse analysis, or ecostylistics. Firstly, intransitive material process clauses with natural elements as Actors can be detected as widespread in modern lyric poetry in English in a tradition going at least back to Wordsworth, and exemplified too in the poems of Edward Thomas, and William Golding's The Inheritors. Secondly nominalization can counter the thingification of the world, which challenges the typical material process clause dividing events into nouns and verbs as in the poem 'Birdsong for Two Voices' by Alice Oswald, and the novel Pincher Martin by William Golding. Thirdly, natural elements can be represented as powerful Actors by reworking Relational process clauses into Material ones, with Tokens promoted into Actors, also well illustrated by Wordsworth and Thomas. These second and third techniques are known as grammatical metaphor, and lexical metaphors, too, allow us to blur the distinction between humans and nature through personification and by poetry which represents nature as a Sayer, communicating with us to stress our interdependence. A further blurring technique is the co-ordination of human and non human in noun phrases. Analysis of Alice Oswald's 'Song of a Stone' and material from Richard Powers' The Overstory illustrate many varieties of metaphors and several of the above techniques and themes.