‘living well, within the limits of our planet’: terms in eu press releases

Terminological Approaches in the European Context


Edited by

Paola Faini


Edited by Paola Faini

This book first published 2017

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2017 by Paola Faini and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,

electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without

the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-4490-X

ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4490-1

TABLE OF CONTENTS Editor’s Preface ......................................................................................... ix Contributors ............................................................................................. xiii

Terminology: Introductory Perspectives Chapter One ................................................................................................. 2 Unity and Diversity in Terminology: The Eternal Paradox María Teresa Cabré Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 13 Converting the European Terminology Database IATE into the World’s Largest Multilingual Data Space Rodolfo Maslias

Part I: Terminology in European Academic Settings Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 20 Terminology in European University Settings: The Case of Course Unit Descriptions Adriano Ferraresi Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 41 Evaluating Institutional Academic English Terminology for Internationalization: the Website and Online Student Services of the University of Macerata (Italy) as a Case Study Antonietta Lemme and Federico Gaspari Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 64 How Translators and Interpreters Cope in Different Ways with Lexical/Terminological Uncertainty when they Deal with English as the Lingua Franca: A Rationale for Specific Terminological Training Sara Vandewaetere and Hildegard Vermeiren

Table of Contents

vi

Part II: European Union and National Issues Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 82 Translators and EU Parallel Texts: Help or Trap? Exploring Terminological Differences between EU and National Legal Documents Sara Castagnoli Chapter Seven ............................................................................................ 98 Terminology, Bilingualism and Language Planning (or Lack Thereof): The Case of Maltese Sergio Portelli Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 107 Bureaucratic Terminology, or, the Hardships of Language Simplification in Italy Paola Faini Chapter Nine ............................................................................................ 132 Translating EU Terminology from English as the Dominant Language into Serbian Biljana ori Francuski Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 149 The Anglicization of Italian Military Language Carmen Fiano and Cristiano Furiassi

Part III: Brain Processes, Corpora

Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 168 Specialized Knowledge Processing in the Brain: An fMRI Study Pamela Faber, Juan Verdejo-Román, Pilar León-Araúz, Arianne Reimerink, and Gloria Guzmán Pérez-Carrillo Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 183 The NeuroNeo Abstracts Corpus: A Tool for Studying Asymmetrical Neology Daniel Linder


vii

Part IV: Sexist Language, Glossaries Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 200 Agentives for Women, a Gap Still to Fill: Dismissing Non-Sexist Language Policies in European Terminological Resources Mercedes Bengoechea Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 222 Telling a Different Story: The Rewriting of Homosexual Narratives in Dubbing Irene Ranzato Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 236 Towards Acceptance—From “Social Deviate” to “Being Androphilic”: A Journey through the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders Barbara Antonucci

Part V: Legal and Economic Terminology Chapter Sixteen ....................................................................................... 254 From DIY Translations to Official Standardization and Back Again? 50 Years of Experience with Italian and German Legal Terminology Work in South Tyrol Elena Chiocchetti, Natascia Ralli and Elena Stanizzi Chapter Seventeen ................................................................................... 271 Equal Respect or Equal Effect: The Untranslatability of Legal Terminology and Its Impact on Language Parity in the EU David Albert Best Chapter Eighteen ..................................................................................... 288 Legal Terminology in Cyprus: Linguistic Issues and Issues of Accessibility Georgios Floros Chapter Nineteen ..................................................................................... 305 Romanian Economic Terminology in European Union Institutions Luciana Sabina Tcaciuc and Vladislav Mackevic

Table of Contents

viii

Part VI: Methodology, Rationalization, Innovation

Chapter Twenty ....................................................................................... 328 Towards a Methodology for Performance Evaluation in Terminology Planning Besharat Fathi Chapter Twenty-One ............................................................................... 348 Green Light for Terminology Development Larisa I inska, Marina Platonova, and Tatjana Smirnova Chapter Twenty-Two ............................................................................... 365 Terminology Case Study: A Conference Interpreter’s Viewpoint Karin Sibul Chapter Twenty-Three ............................................................................. 381 “Living Well, Within the Limits of Our Planet”: Terms in EU Press Releases Katherine E. Russo Chapter Twenty-Four .............................................................................. 400 Challenges in Managing Terminological Resources: The Case of an IATE Project Elpida Loupaki and Rodolfo Maslias Chapter Twenty-Five ............................................................................... 413 New Concepts and New Terms in the European Union Environmental Policy Luisa Caiazzo

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

“LIVING WELL, WITHIN THE LIMITS OF OUR PLANET”:

TERMS IN EU PRESS RELEASES

KATHERINE E. RUSSO

1. Introduction

On the 12th December 2015, the representatives of the 195 nations belonging to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change met in Paris to sign the first legally binding document on climate change (UNFCCC). The deal was defined as “an historic agreement to combat climate change and unleash actions and investment towards a low carbon, resilient and sustainable future” (UN Climate Change Newsroom, 2015). Since the Kyoto Protocol (1996-1997), the issue has been discussed in the UNFCCC Cancun Adaptation Framework, in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Report, and has entered the agenda of a series of international agencies and institutions such as the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), World Trade Organization (WTO) and Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The European Union has greatly contributed to the notable achievement by

building a strong coalition of developed and developing countries from Africa, the Caribbean, the Pacific and Latin America, which was named the Ambition Coalition. Most interestingly for this article, recent EU measures such as strategies and action programmes aimed at mitigating the impact of climate change have often highlighted the role of knowledge management and divulgation in achieving environmental goals. For instance, ‘better informed decision-making’ was defined as one of the main objectives of the EU strategy on adaptation to climate change (2013). Similarly, in January 2014 the EU commission announced the 7th Environmental Action, which identified the following key enablers: “better information by improving the knowledge base; more and wiser

382 Chapter Twenty-Three

investment for environment and climate policy; and the full integration of environmental requirements and considerations into other policies” (2014).

As a consequence, the climate science domain has greatly expanded in the inter-institutional terminology database, Inter-Active Terminology for Europe (IATE). In addition, the European Climate Adaptation Glossary was published in 2013. The latter was compiled by selecting the most relevant terms from various reports, including the IPCC's assessment reports and the glossary of the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UN ISIDR). As the European Climate Adaptation Glossary (henceforth Climate-ADAPT Glossary) webpage notes,

This glossary provides common definitions of the terms used frequently in the clearinghouse. It was compiled by selecting the most relevant terms from various reports, including the IPCC's 4th assessment reports of the different working groups (Working Group I, II and III) and the UN ISIDR. Numerous terms and concepts are introduced in climate assessment reports, adaptation plans and dialogs by the climate community at large. Definitions of terms and concepts differ between organizations and policy processes (see e.g. the overviews made for the OECD, the Climate Changes Spatial Planning Program or the disaster reduction community). In addition, terms are not always used consistently across a report or study. Especially concepts like risk, vulnerability and scenarios are used in different and sometimes confusing ways. Thus you may find different usage of terms across the data sources provided through the clearinghouse. This glossary is based on the definitions of key adaptation terms and concepts used by the climate change community. Given the need to promote a common understanding among stakeholders and the potential (financial) implications of diverging definitions, it is advised to work toward common definitions, at least for a core set of terms and concepts, when engaging in adaptation policy development.

As clearly stated in the webpage description, although the contamination and dynamic flow of information permeate all EU policy fields, the differing use of terms and the consequent terminological variation within/across texts by different organizations interacting in the climate change “discourse community” (Swales 1990) are regarded as a socio-economic liability. Yet while the debate on climate change argumentation has been explored in expert and non-expert debates (Smart 2011), the reasons for the instability and “fuzziness” of climate-change terms in European media and political discourse remains somehow underexplored. In order to test whether the EU commission discourse community adopts the specialized terms it has agreed upon in communicating with its citizens, a corpus (EU Press Releases Corpus, henceforth EUPRC), was

Terms in EU Press Releases 383

specifically compiled to represent climate change terms in EU media discourse in the years 1996-1997 and 2014-2015. The analysis tested the dynamic nature of terms related to climate change in EU Commission press communications, in particular press releases, where the employment of terms may be analyzed as authentic instances of use and in their “institutional” context by examining the interplay between discourse and the institutional setting in which they emerge (Swales 1990; Carta 2015). It is the contention of the article that press releases may be analyzed in terms of the selection of terms to convey attitude and evaluation towards socio-political agendas and to promote community building (Tilakaratna and Ahmar Mahboob 2013, 64).

2. Approach

During the last two decades, the lively debate in terminology has been reflected in the increase of interdisciplinary studies on term formation, management and retrieval. Terms have been studied from textual, pragmatic, social and cognitive perspectives (Araúz et al 2013; Cabré 1999). Moreover, research has challenged numerous assumptions regarding term formation (i.e. monoreferentiality, monosemy, transparency, stability). Seminal work by Maria Teresa Cabré Castellví has emphasized the polyhedral nature of terms (cognitive, verbal and communicative). In her view, terms “represent” specialized knowledge in an organized way in order to facilitate structured “mediation” and “communication” between subject specialists, translators, broadcasters, technical writers, etc. Terminology responds to the needs of a community related to “specialized or specific subject areas within which it studies knowledge (units, structure, representation, evolution, acquisition, etc.) in its relation to expression” (2000). A term may therefore be defined as “a lexico-semantic unit referring to a specific concept that is used in a specialized domain of knowledge and which is widely acknowledged by domain-expert language users” (Pecman 2014, 5).

In addition, terminology has increasingly employed a bottom-up approach to solve problems encountered or anticipated in language use i.e. this formulation requires identification of the language problem in discourse. It has devoted greater attention to studies on term variation and to the employment of “dynamic” and “flexible” data and knowledge management (Temmerman and Van Campenhoudt 2011). As Marie-Claude L’Homme, Ulrich Heid and Juan C. Sager note, in the last two decades researchers have greatly reshaped the field by agreeing on the following premises:


terms are not ‘context-independent’ units per se, they can only be envisaged as such for particular applications for which this viewpoint is necessary. On the contrary, many terms are heavily “context-dependent” units and have to be described according to their function in a particular text. Numerous terms are polysemic and some are ambiguous (this becomes even more obvious when looking at them in running text). Terms are also subject to variation (synonymy, syntactic transformation, reduction, ellipsis, etc.) (2003, 153).

The dynamic and multidimensional nature of terms has been increasingly analyzed in relation to natural and contextual knowledge. Contextual information, as a form of expert knowledge representation that allows users to “comprehend” how terms are used in specialized texts, is considered a fundamental part of terminology and has become rich in “syntactic, pragmatic and cognitive information” (Araúz et al 2013, 34).

Context includes external features (situational and cultural) and internal features (cognitive) where the meaning of linguistic forms is understood as a function of their use. According to Margaret Rogers, context is responsible for the dynamic nature of terms since “the same object may be referred to in a text from various perspectives if different characteristics of the concept representing that object are activated, or if different relations to other concepts are established” (Rogers 2004, 221). Terminological variation may indeed be the consequence of the “con/text” of terms, which accounts for the uniqueness of each text due to the common ground and shared representations that language users draw on to communicate with each other (van Dijk 2009; van Dijk and Calsamiglia 2004). Hence context of culture and context of situation are pivotal since the meaning potential of any term will always be exploited in different ways depending on the shared knowledge of the community involved (van Dijk 2009). Thus, context may also refer to EU institutional settings and to the institutionalized framings of activities or group-derived prescriptive norms (Carta 2015, 66).

As aforementioned, recent research has devoted greater attention to contextual information and discourse as the natural habitat of terms (Humbley 2009; Pecman 2012, 2014; Picton 2009). Following this line of thought, the present study employs Corpus Linguistics tools combined with Critical Discourse Analysis to consider diachronic terminological variation (Baker 2006). Terminology has greatly profited from Corpus Linguistics tools and techniques, which offer the possibility of observing the diachronic evolution of terms in naturally occurring language by comparing frequencies, extracting contexts, equivalents and most of all to observe knowledge evolution insofar as “meaning/concept variations can


be discovered by tracking changes of expression in the texts” (Cabré 1998, 141). As well as helping us to restrict bias, Corpus Linguistics is a useful way to approach discourse analysis because of the incremental effect of discourse (Baker 2006, 13). Uncovering underlying discourses and rhetorical functions is made possible by the analysis of the cumulative effect, for as Stubbs notes “repeated patterns show that evaluative meanings are not merely personal and idiosyncratic but widely shared in discourse communities” (2001, 2015). Moreover, discourse analysis may help us to envision terminology as “language in action” in different genres, styles or text types. As numerous scholars in the field of discourse analysis have found, a genre comprises a class of communicative events, the members of which share some set of communicative purposes. These purposes are recognized by the expert members of the discourse community, and thereby constitute the rationale (i.e. social purpose) for the genre. This (social purpose) shapes the schematic (discourse) structure of the discourse and influences and constrains choice of content and style (Swales 1980, 58; Martin and Rose 2007, 8). In this light, discourse analysis may illuminate whether terms may be used rhetorically for a specific communicative purpose.

3. Methodology

The EU Press Releases Corpus (henceforth EUPRC) was designed by selecting texts from the press releases website of the European Commission covering the years 1996-1997 and 2014-2015 with the query term climate change. In 1996-1997 the average number of press releases regarding climate change increased since the Kyoto Protocol was adopted in Kyoto, Japan, on 11 December 1997, while the 2014-2015 period was chosen in light of the abovementioned EU commission’s investment in climate change reduction strategies.1 The press releases website included 145 texts, which are diversely distributed per year (see Table 23.1). As greater terminological variation is assumed to be found in popularization of climate change science, press releases and statements were retained in the EUPRC corpus (tagged as <PR>, <S>, respectively).

Corpus 1997-1998 2014-2015 Total Texts 70 75 145 Tokens 399854 401627 801481

Table 23.1 Size of the EUPRC corpus


The analysis was carried out using AntConc, a concordancer developed by Lawrence Anthony (2005) to explore the context and collocation of terms. The starting point of the analysis was a search for the terms contained in the European Climate-ADAPT Glossary, which consists of 106 monolexical and polylexical terms. To get a more comprehensive rather than fragmented view of the terms under investigation, the tokens were compared to specialized glossaries and specialized term banks:

- United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction Glossary - Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Glossary (1995) - Oxford Dictionary of Earth Sciences (2008) - Termium–The government of Canada’s terminology and linguistic data

bank - InterActive Terminology for Europe (IATE)–The EU’s multilingual

term base.

The occurrences which could not be referred to the terms due to polysemy were excluded and the items under investigation were grouped according to the following term formation matrices for categorization.

Use of existing resources

SI Simile

ME Metaphor

Modification of existing resources

De Derivation

CMP Compounding

PT Phrasal terms

CN Conversion

CM Compression

Creation of new linguistic entities

N Neonymy

Table 23.2 Term formation matrices for categorization (Sager 1997;

Picton 2011)

To test whether any of the attested combinations had followed a gradual path toward integration and stabilization in the corpus, each sub-corpus was analyzed side-by-side to describe the development and choice of those combinations. The search was later narrowed from bulk data


retrieval to text analysis to combine a corpus-based and discourse-based approach in order to ascertain whether terms choice could be related to rhetorical functions.

4. Results and Discussion

As a preliminary indication of the differences between the two sections of the EUPRC corpus (1996-1997 and 2014-2015), a frequency search revealed that the terms included in the Climate-ADAPT Glossary have unsurprisingly increased in frequency (Table 23.3). Yet the frequency search combined with the matrices of term formation revealed that complex noun groups and compounds which emerge as micro-definitions, such as greenhouse gas, sustainable development, disaster risk management, disaster risk reduction, energy balance, global warming, radiative forcing, sustainability strategy, and peri-urban, hydrothermal, palaeoclimate, do not display a significant increase. Conversely, acronyms, metaphors and derivations have greatly augmented.

Fig 23.1 Frequency of occurrences in EUPRC

In the EUPRC, lexical items of high frequency in non-specialized domains are generally preferred. They consist in terms which have undergone semantic shift by narrowing or extension from general usage into special usage, such as risk, cost-effective, and forecast, and terms which have shifted from special to general usage such as green-house gas or GDP (gross domestic product) (see Table 23.3).

0

100

200

300

400

500

600

700

800

1996-1997

2014-2015


Term 2014-2015

1996-1997

Risk 196 16

Sustainable development 140 38

Resilience 98 0

Greenhouse gas 97 20

GDP 85 2

Adaptation 51 0

Mitigation 47 0

Prevention 47 7

SIDS 40 0

WTO 36 11

FAO 26 0

OECD 25 3

COP 24 0

Cost-effective 20 15

EU15/25/28 15 4

MDGS 15 0

Disaster risk reduction 14 0

Sink 10 0

SIDS 40 0

Urbanisation 12 1

GHG 12 0

IPCC 11 3

UNFCC 11 0

Vulnerability 26 10

Forecast 9 5

Global Warming 8 4

Public-private partnership 6 0

Mainstreaming 6 0

CBD 6 0


EIA 6 0

Peri-urban 3 0

Sustainability strategy 3 0

Ecosystem based 3 0

Land-use 2 2

NGO 2 8

UNDP 1 0

Anthropogenic 1 1

Radiation 1 1

Salinisation 1 0

Desertification 1 0

Biosphere 0 1

Energy balance 0 2

Table 23.3 Distribution of Climate-ADAPT Glossary terms in sections

of EUPRC

Moreover, despite the EU commission’s call for the avoidance of terminological variation, it is often encountered in the EUPRC. For instance, disaster risk management/risk management/disaster management is an example of strong terminological variation in the corpus. Disaster risk management is defined as

The systematic process of using administrative directives, organizations, and operational skills and capacities to implement strategies, policies and improved coping capacities in order to lessen the adverse impacts of hazards and the possibility of disaster. Disaster risk management aims to avoid, lessen or transfer the adverse effects of hazards through activities and measures for prevention, mitigation and preparedness. (Climate-ADAPT Glossary)

However the terms are often used as synonyms even though they stand

in a relation of hyponymy.


Fig. 23.2 Example of terminological variation in the EUPRC

Among terms, the general preference for the use of abstract nouns is

also observable. As Humbley (2009) argues, the process of term formation consists essentially in establishing a connection between the old and the new and Halliday’s (1989) theorization of grammatical metaphors (especially nominalizations) may explain this phenomenon. Grammatical metaphor was defined by Halliday (1989) as a language item transferred from a more expected word class to another, such as the verbs “adapt” or the adjective “resilient” being transformed into the nouns “adaptation” and “resilience”. In particular, the search revealed a comparably consistent growth of the terms vulnerability and sustainability, and the novel appearance and high frequency of the terms adaptation, mitigation, and resilience in the 2014-2015 section of the corpus. In the case of the wildcard search sustainab*, 707 concordance hits were found, among which the two noun groups, sustainable development and sustainable strategy, advocated by the Climate-ADAPT Glossary, respectively have 178 and 0 occurrences, while the noun sustainability which is not recommended by the Glossary is comparably very frequent with 117 occurrences. Also in the case of adaptation, we find adapt* with 138 hits, among which 51 refer to the recommended term adaptation and 0 to the term adaptive capacity. In the case of resilien*, we find 138 occurrences,


among which 98 relate to the term resilience. The latter trend is particularly interesting since climate scientists have often called for the avoidance of abstract terms, as they may hinder research-based decision making and the communication of consistent frameworks to stakeholders, and since the EU commission has followed this recommendation by greatly investing in terminology regulation and management.

A possible explanation for the high frequency of abstract terms is that although the EU Commission highly encourages the employment of exact terms, press offices, commissioners and commissioners offices may find it hard to use uncommon, low-frequency and specialized terms, and may have less problems in using terms that derive from general language. Yet, the selection of such abstract terms may be influenced by the communicative purpose of the genre, that is “transversal communication and transposition” (Faini 2014, 11), and the intersubjective construal of the reader-in-the-text (Thompson 2012, 81). As Calsamiglia and van Dijk (2004, 370) note, the popularization of science in the press is not merely characterized by

special textual structures, but also relevant properties of the social situation (…) such as a specific domain, institutional settings, special professional and communicative roles, as well as various kinds of specialized and lay knowledge of these participants.

The communicative purpose of filling a gap in the knowledge of the audience entails

the transformation of specialized knowledge into ‘everyday’ or ‘lay’ knowledge, as well as a recontextualization of scientific discourse (…) This means that popularization discourse needs to be formulated in such a way that non-specialized readers are able to construct lay versions of specialized knowledge and integrate these with their existing knowledge. (Calsamiglia and van Dijk 2004, 370)

To maximize the chance of a press release being journalistically appropriated and to exert the utmost control on how they are used, press release writers try to meet the formal requirements of news reporting including the avoidance of terminology (Maat 2007).

A further preliminary consideration in terms of diachronic language change is that while sustainab* is the only term which was already present in 1996-1997, it is absent in the glossary. In this light, the absence of “sustainability” from the EU Climate-ADAPT Glossary may be caused by it being no longer considered a viable term due to its general usage and its polysemy, while “adaptation” and “resilience” which are recent neonyms


are still perceived as such. Yet the great increase in term formation and usage of abstract nouns still begs for investigation. A closer analysis of the contextual elements of their use may be useful in formulating a hypothesis on this phenomenon. In order to get a closer picture of the abstract terms, collocation patterns were considered in order to evaluate their semantic prosody, i.e. “the consistent aura of meaning with which a form is imbued by its collocates” (Louw, 1993, 157).

Adaptation Resilience

Rank Collocation Rank Collocation 2 climate 7 climate 4 change 11 change 6 mitigation 14 we 11 well 15 our 14 key 17 increase 15 we 20 have 20 transport 22 risk 22 support 23 help 23 strategy 25 will 25 new 26 that 26 innovation 27 support 27 green 28 eu 28 development 29 disasters 29 countries 30 countries 30 Africa 32 action 32 year 35 reduce 35 wide global 36 urban 38 energy 38 technology 39 communities 41 resilience 41 commission 42 report 42 stability 45 ipcc 49 prone 46 initiative 50 need 47 further 51 integrate 48 forests 52 improving 49 finance 53 humanitarian 50 eu 55 food 56 biodiversity 56 environmental 59 agreement 58 enhance 60 address 59 emissions


62 action 61 efforts 63 village 62 economic 64 threat 64 alliance 65 techniques 66 africa 69 targets 71 vulnerable 70 sustainable 72 together 71 strengthen 73 them 75 share 76 systems 76 security 77 sustainable 77 sector 78 sites 78 science 79 should 79 rural 80 resilience 80 risk 81 region 81 revisiting 83 protection 82 research 84 promoting 83 relevant 87 programme 85 promotion 88 policies 86 reductions 89 most 87 range 90 modernization 88 provision 91 million 89 protection 92 measures

Table 23.4 Collocation patterns of Adaptation and Resilience sorted

by frequency of occurrence

In the 2014-2015 section of the corpus, the term “adaptation” occurs 51 times. Collocates indicate predictable co-occurrences with climate change, mitigation, etc. “new”, “will”, “initiative”, “innovation”, may be seen as markers of the novelty of the term. Other collocates such as “better” and “successfully” function as boosters and entail a positive attitude towards the terms. Resilience displayed similar positive appreciation (Martin and White 2005). On the other side, strong ties to threatening events such as “disaster”, “risk”, and the need to defend societies through support, protection, security are also found. For instance, the following description of the EU commission’s investment in adaptation and resilience as abstract nouns which stand for advancement, development and modernization, in opposition to disaster, loss, and damage, encourages a positive evaluation and promotion of the EU through overlexicalization in the use of the term “ambitious”, “central”, “essential” and “adverse”.


Ex 1. The EU regards ambitious action to prepare for and respond to the effects of climate change to be a central part of a balanced agreement. Both emissions reductions and adaptation will be essential to manage and reduce the risk of adverse impacts of climate change, including addressing the risk of loss and damage associated with the impacts of climate change.

In this light, it may be argued that terms such as sustainability,

adaptation and resilience have in time been imbued with positive connotations by lexico-grammatical resources which regulate appraisal, affect and evaluation through intensification and diffusion (Martin and White 2005). As numerous studies in discourse analysis have shown, the press often proceeds through ideological squaring by aligning us alongside or against people through referential choices which create opposites in order to make events and issues appear simplified in order to control their meaning (van Dijk 1993; Martin and White 2005; Tilakaratna and Mahboob 2013). This may be further confirmed by close text-analysis of the following examples. In the first and second example, the EU commission is clearly identified as a social actor which “invests” in climate adaptation and resilience as part of a wider profitable enterprise,

Ex. 2 The European Commission is working together with the European Investment Bank to establish a Natural Capital Financing Facility in order to leverage private and public investment in natural capital-related projects. The objective of the facility is to support projects that generate revenues whilst protecting natural capital and contributing to biodiversity and climate adaptation objectives, through loans and contributions to investment funds.

Ex. 3 Reducing vulnerability and building the resilience of populations at risk are prerequisites for poverty reduction and sustainable development. This is why, the EU is committed to investing in these priorities. Risk management is already a part of all EU humanitarian aid and development assistance programmes and will become an even more integral component in the future.

Moreover, collocates reveal a strong polarization of the only social actors involved in texts. On the one side, the personal pronoun “we” and possessive pronoun “our”, the EU commission, and programmes, are social actors, and on the other side developing societies are identified as the passive recipients of EU investments. In both example 2 and 3 the actual recipients of the investment are anonymized and collectivized. On the other side, when non-EU developing countries are the recipients of


investments in resilience, EU as a social actor is hidden behind passivization as in Ex. 4 and depersonalization as in Ex. 5,

Ex. 4 There is a need to develop local agricultural production and commercial farming and to address national and household food security. The forestry sector is also vital to increase Bhutan's resilience to climate change.

Ex. 5 The post-Hyogo framework for action should give SIDS a new international context in which they can better integrate risk management and resilience into their policies and strategies.

Thus, it may argued that abstract terms such as vulnerability, resilience and adaptation are exceptionally high in the frequency ranking due to their recent employment by the EU commission as a political discourse which foregrounds the positive role of EU in the global scenario. As Martin and White (2005, 95) argue, lexico-grammatical resources may be employed explicitly to guide appraisal and “are dialogically directed towards aligning the addressee into a community of shared value and belief.” Thus, the choice of abstract terms may be regarded as a persuasive “rhetorical device” (Pecman 2012) for identity and community building which conceals social actors and idealizes policies through abstraction. This becomes evident in the press statement which announced the 7th Environment Action Programme, “Living well, within the limits of our planet”,

In 2050, we live well, within the planet’s ecological limits. Our prosperity and healthy environment stem from an innovative, circular economy where nothing is wasted and where natural resources are managed sustainably, and biodiversity is protected, valued and restored in ways that enhance our society’s resilience. Our low-carbon growth has long been decoupled from resource use, setting the pace for a safe and sustainable global society.

The press release was clearly intended as a divulgation of the institution’s activities in the field of sustainable development and resilience, yet its foregrounding of the personal pronoun “our” aims at aligning the audience. The press release does not simply explain, define, or reformulate the initiative of the institution but promotes it as a central facet of European identity. “Living well, within the limits of our planet” thus acquires a completely new meaning. The collocation patterns of the terms adaptation and resilience confirm these intuitions about the insistent reiteration of the magnitude and catastrophic impact of the hazards to intensify affects such as fear and to circulate discourses of protection,


securization and risk (Friedman 2011). These discourses emphasise ideas of security and safety and interrogate the meaning of “community building” at times of crisis.

5. Conclusions

As Humbley (2009, 8) proposes, terms may be defined after Halliday as “theoretical constructs” which emerge in response to the needs of unfolding discourse as grammatical metaphors and are taken up by the discourse communities, i.e. grammatical categories allow human experience to be transferred through language into knowledge. In this light, the analysis of terms regards both the thought processes involved and the constraints placed on these processes within the community where they are developed. In particular, institutional press releases are characterized by a participant framework in which writers provide information to journalists in the hope that it will be passed on to the general public (Fairclough 1995; Maat 2007). Through the divulgation of specialized knowledge a relation between the participants in the communicative event is enacted which relies on the utilization of both the discursive and the extra-discursive resources to which each has access. Terms are common to the extent that shared knowledge, culture and language allow individuals to establish a reciprocity of perspectives or definition of the situation through dyadic couplings. Accordingly, terminological variation in institutional divulgation may be viewed as bearing the imprint of social needs and uses (Sager 2001; Riley 2007). In this sense the present article has found that while terminology regulation and management is part of the EU community’s construal shared meaning and social knowledge, the use of the latter in press releases is often influenced by promotional purposes. Press releases as all news discourse are often based on scripts, which are a portion of knowledge often shared unconsciously within a group of people and drawn upon in making sense of the world. A press release enacts the networking of the practices of an institution with those of press reporting—this networking is enabled through the regular chaining of genres such as press releases and news reports. Thus, further research may also shed new light on whether terms are part of the “collective formation of argumentation” across networks of texts produced by professional organizations as they engage in public debates over major social issues (Smart 2011).


Notes

1 The Kyoto Protocol is an international agreement linked to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which commits its Parties by setting internationally binding emission reduction targets. Recognizing that developed countries are principally responsible for the current high levels of GHG emissions in the atmosphere as a result of more than 150 years of industrial activity, the Protocol places a heavier burden on developed nations under the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities.” (http://unfccc.int/kyoto_protocol/items/2830.php)

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