Lexicogrammar and ecolinguistics

• Main Author: GOATLY, Andrew Peter
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Digital Commons @ Lingnan University 2017
• Subjects: algonquin
• Online Access: https://commons.ln.edu.hk/sw_master/6708

Lexicogrammar (mis-)represents the ‘natural’ world through original metaphors, disputed terms, affective terms, conventional metaphors and conventional lexis. More important, the typical transitive material process clause, reflecting canonical event structure, marginalizes nature as part of the setting and represents nature as passive. Analysis of the environmental report State of the World 2012 reveals a semantics of grammar conforming to such a representation, except when nature provides for humans. By contrast, Wordsworth’s and Edward Thomas’s poetry represents nature as powerful actor-communicator and vital experience by means of ergative verbs, activation of experiences and tokens/existents and personification and coordination, problematizing the human/nature division. The Algonquin language Blackfoot’s more radical noncanonical event grammar emphasizes process and better reflects the insights of modern science.