Building a set of digital corpora and data sets to examine the discursive representation of nature and environmental change

As environmental change accelerates and increasingly impacts more aspects of our lives, understanding how people make sense of these phenomena becomes ever more important. How is knowledge about nature represented and negotiated in order to allow for public debate and political action? This paper presents results from Changing Nature: A lexical and argumentative analysis of public debates on nature, a research project funded by the Research Council of Norway that examines the relationship between nature and language change in Norway in the time period 1998-2019. The analytical focus of the project is on the relationship between language change and conceptual change in the environmental domain and specifically of the contribution of neology to public debate (for an overview, see Andersen & Gjesdal, 2020; Gjesdal & Kristiansen, 2021). In order to investigate this topic, the project has developed a set of relevant digital corpora and data sets. This paper describes the collection and construction of these resources, based on methodologies developed previously by members of the research team (Andersen & Hofland, 2012; Losnegaard et al., 2013). The first data set is the Naturen corpus. Naturen is a popular science journal which was founded in 1877, and it is the oldest popular science journal in Norway. The second data source is a data set of NOU reports which has been compiled in the context of the Changing Nature project. The data set consists of all the NOUs from 1998-2017, 669 reports in total. The NOUs cover a range of issues that are deemed to be timely and topical by decision makers, as they are written by expert committees at the request of a ministry. Thus, they also discuss crucial issues related to nature and the environment in this period. Finally, we present a word list of environmental neologisms derived from the data sets. The paper will present the resources that have been developed in the project as well as a pilot study to demonstrate the interest of combining different data sets to examine the interaction of lexical change and language change in the environmental domain. We compare neologisms in the two corpora from the domains of climate change and biodiversity with a view of how they differ quantitatively and qualitatively (collocations, patterns of neology formation). References Andersen G and Gjesdal AM (2020) Karbonsnakk – hva snakker vi om når vi bruker begrepet «karbon»? Nytt norsk tidsskrift 37(2): 163-178. Andersen, G., & Hofland, K. (2012). Building a large corpus based on newspapers from the web. In G. Andersen (Ed.), Exploring Newspaper Language - Using the web to create and investigate a large corpus of modern Norwegian (pp. 1-30). John Benjamins Publishing. Gjesdal AM and Kristiansen M (2021) Communicating Natural Events. Emerging Terminology across Corpora In: V. Delavigne V and De Vecchi DD (eds) Termes en discours. Entreprises et organisations. Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle. Losnegaard, G. S. et al. (2013). Linking Northern European infrastructures for improving the accessibility and documentation of complex resources. Proceedings of the workshop on Nordic language research infrastructure at NODALIDA 2013. NEALT Proceedings Series 20 / Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings 89: 44–59.