Metaphors in texts about climate change
Alice Deignan
University of Leeds (UK)
a.h.deignan@education.leeds.ac.uk
Abstract
This article discusses the use of metaphors and metonyms in texts about climate
change in different registers, with a particular focus on the information given to
young people, and what they understand about the topic. It begins by considering
the role of metaphorical thinking and language in science, and reviews some of
the work on scientific metaphor in expert and popular genres. The article analyses
the different functions of metaphors in two texts about anthropogenic climate
change from different genres, arguing that in the popular text analysed metaphors
tend to have the function of entertaining and dramatizing, and introducing and
concluding (interpersonal and textual), as opposed to their informational
(ideational) function in the research article that was analysed. I then discuss a
corpus and discourse analysis of young people’s talk about climate change. The
young people’s use of figurative language is compared with that of researchers
and educationalists. The analysis finds that, consistent with work on scientific
popularisations, written texts for non-specialists tend to “open up” in Knudsen’s
(2003) terms experts’ metaphors, extending them creatively. I found that on
occasion this seems to lead to, or reflect, misunderstandings of the underlying
science. I also find that young people reference Arctic and Antarctic animals as
symbols of the problem of climate change.
Keywords: metaphor, science, climate change, education, schools.
Resumen
Las metáforas en los textos sobr e el cambio c limático
Este artículo discute el uso de las metáforas y metonimias en los textos sobre el
cambio climático en diferentes registros, con un interés especial en la información
proporcionada a la gente joven, y en lo que ellos entienden sobre el tema. El
artículo comienza considerando el papel del razonamiento metafórico y del
lenguaje en la ciencia y revisa el trabajo de las metáforas científicas en los géneros
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ISSN: 1139-7241 / e-ISSN: 2340-2784
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ALICE DEIGNAN
expertos y populares. El artículo analiza las diferentes funciones de las metáforas
en dos texos sobre el cambio climático antropogénico en diferentes géneros y
defiende que en los textos populares analizados las metáforas tienden a realizar la
función de entretenimiento y dramatización así como de introducción y conclusión
(interpersonal y textual), en contraposición con la función informacional
(ideacional) del artículo de investigación que se analizó. A continuación llevo a
cabo el examen de un análisis de corpus y del discurso de la gente joven sobre el
cambio climático. La comparación del lenguaje figurativo de estos con el de los
investigadores y de los expertos en educación demuestra que, como se recoge en
la investigación sobre la popularización del discurso científico, los textos escritos
para los no especialistas tienden a "abrir", en términos de Knudsen (2003), las
metáforas de los expertos, extendiéndolas de forma creativa. Descubrí que en
ocasiones esto parece conducir a, o reflejar, interpretaciones erróneas de la ciencia
subyacente. También observo que la gente joven se refiere a los animales árticos y
antárticos como símbolos del problema del cambio climático.
Palabras clave: metáfora, ciencia, cambio climático, educación, escuelas.
1. Introduction
This article describes a set of corpus and discourse analytic studies of
figurative language used in writing and talk about climate change. Climate
change is a current and urgent issue; 2015 and 2016 were the two warmest
years on record (Met Office press release, 2017), and large numbers of
animal and bird species are already negatively affected (Pacifici et al., 2017).
Levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were below 300 parts per million
(ppm) for over 400,000 years, until 1950. In 2013 the figure passed 400 ppm,
and at the time of writing the figure is 406 ppm (NASA website, 2017).
Within the scientific community, there is widespread agreement that climate
change is happening, and is due to human activity (Boykoff, 2011). Climate
change can only be slowed, if at all, by dramatic modifications to lifestyle and
consumption. Young people born in the 1990s and in this century will
probably live to see some major impacts of climate change, yet this same
group of people are under an unprecedented pressure to consume, from the
media, their peers and advertisers. This is a behaviour which is directly in
conflict with the need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, but young people
are unlikely to draw this conclusion without targeted information about
climate change and its causes.
Non-scientists generally, and perhaps especially young people, do not usually
read specialist scientific writing on climate change, but rather get
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METAPHORS IN TEXTS ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE
information through school and educational materials, and from popular
science writing. As Boykoff writes,
People typically do not start their day with a morning cup of coffee and the
latest peer-reviewed journal article. Instead, citizens turn to mass media—
television, newspapers, radio, internet and blogs— to link formal science and
policy with their everyday lives. (2011: 53)
The research described in this article looks at how metaphors frame climate
science in non-specialist pedagogic and popular texts. I also examine some
of the metaphors used by school students in interviews about climate
change. This is intended as a contribution to finding out what nonspecialists, especially young people, are told about climate change, how this
is framed through metaphor, and, in turn, how they express their
understanding of it. I begin with a discussion of previous research on how
metaphors are used in texts written for scientists and in texts written for the
non-scientific public.
2. Metaphor and doing science
Metaphor use in science has much in common with what we know about
metaphor in language and thought generally. Metaphorical language
pervades the discourse of science, and, like metaphors in non-technical
genres, scientific metaphors often “highlight and hide” (Lakoff & Johnson,
1980: 13) aspects of their topic. A few metaphors in science “frame our way
of thinking” (Cuddington, 2001: 464); that is, they form a backdrop to
scientific thought and discussion and thus are more powerful than highly
visible metaphors. An example of this is the BALANCE metaphor, which is
also frequent in other specialised registers such as Law and Politics (Sanchez,
2011). In the natural sciences, the metaphor could be phrased as (GOOD)
NATURAL SYSTEMS ARE IN BALANCE. In everyday language, the
metaphor is realised in brand names of products such as pet foods and
vitamin tablets, which claim to restore the body’s balance. The metaphor is
seen in educational materials where it is claimed that predators and their prey
live in balance, and it also underlies some specialist scientific discourse.
Cooper (2001) traces the origins of the BALANCE metaphor back to Greek
thought. Cuddington notes that the metaphor frames nature as “a beneficent
force” (2001: 463), and before Darwin, an order that was believed to have
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been designed by God. She argues that the metaphor suggests an unscientific
idea, which has now been superseded by the more sophisticated
mathematical concept of “equilibrium”, also, of course, metaphorical. In the
discipline of ecology, equilibrium is a way of describing species numbers,
where predators, food supply and other influences are such that the numbers
of a species are stable over time. This mathematical notion has no intrinsic
evaluative quality, but it can become blurred with the older BALANCE
metaphor, whose positive connotations often seep into it. Both Cooper and
Cuddington note that the BALANCE metaphor has suggested a constancy
that does not, in reality, exist. Species numbers have always fluctuated, often
to extreme degrees. Ladle and Gillson (2009) claim that for some ecologists,
a FLUX OF NATURE metaphor is replacing the BALANCE OF NATURE
one, but that this is not seen more widely in texts accessed by the general
public.
In one of the best known discussions of the framing function of metaphors,
Lakoff (1991) argued that mappings such as A NATION IS A PERSON
justified, and in some cases, directly led to, specific actions in a war context.
Cuddington (2001) and Ladle and Gillson (2009) make the same claim of the
BALANCE OF NATURE metaphor. Cooper (2001) argues that the natural
world is always undergoing change, albeit often very slowly; the BALANCE
metaphor hides this, and is used to argue for conservation activities that
preserve a perceived ideal state. Ladle and Gillson (2009) show, through
corpus and document analysis, that the BALANCE metaphor is associated
with conservation of nature and prevention of change. One example is in
the US, where this approach led to attempts to prevent all forest fires “in
order to prevent disturbance and thereby maintain a perceived balance”
(2009: 230). Ladle and Gillson note that, over time, the result of this policy
was larger, more severe fires, which caused much more serious damage than
would have resulted from the smaller fires that had been prevented.
As well as framing, metaphors are often ways of developing new hypotheses
in science, as described by Boyd (1993: 482). The importance of metaphor
to developing scientific thought is well documented, including by scientists
themselves, such as Brown (2003) and Cuddington (2001). Brown writes of
metaphor:
It is at the very core of what scientists do when they design experiments, make
discoveries, formulate theories and models, and describe their results to others
– in short, when they do science and communicate about it. (2003: 14)
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This author traces in scientific detail the metaphors used by scientists in their
developing understanding of topics such as the atom, protein folding, and
the cell, arguing that metaphors shape the direction of scientific enquiry. He
also argues that the metaphors that dominate and shape thought are as much
a product of culture and embodiment as metaphors in other domains of life.
Scientists have also analysed how metaphors can hinder understandings of
science. In an account of the history of cancer treatment written for nonscientists, Mukherjee (2010), an oncologist, writes that medical researchers’
use of the war metaphor to talk and think about their research seriously
slowed down advances in understanding and developing treatments. The war
metaphor was politically apposite at the time and place he describes: the
Cold War period in the US. Mukherjee argues that the war metaphor portrays
cancer as a homogenous, identifiable enemy, leading to the mistaken
conceptualisation of it as a single disease, for which a single treatment could
be found. Some doctors and researchers believed, he argues, that if only the
weapon – early versions of powerful chemotherapy, administered in the
absence of the drugs that are now available to alleviate its terrible side effects
– was delivered in high enough doses, the enemy could be conquered, over
the battleground of the patient’s body. It is now known that cancer takes a
wide variety of forms, which have a range of different causes, and the
treatments that are available and being developed differ accordingly. He
argues that the misguided search for a single “magic bullet” (page 86) delayed
progress on some cancers, possibly by decades.
3. Science communicated through metaphor to nonscientists
Explorations of metaphors in science communication have divided their use
into, broadly, metaphors used to communicate between peers, and
metaphors used to explain science to the non-scientific public, that is, for a
pedagogical purpose (for example, Boyd, 1993). A repeated finding is that
linguistic metaphors very quickly lose any sense of metaphoricity to
scientists. Knudsen (2003) asked scientists their views about metaphorical
terms in the field of DNA, and reports:
A number of the molecular biologists I have consulted argue that, since they
know exactly which chemical relations and substances are being referred to,
the metaphors in question have lost any figurative quality they might have
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had. In the opinion of these scientists, no definitive difference exists between
these metaphorical concepts and concepts with a mere non-figurative origin.
(2003: 1252-1253)
When the same topics are written about for non-scientists, in popularisations
for example, the metaphors tend to be, in Knudsen’s terms, “opened up”.
She compared the metaphors used to talk about DNA by scientists in peer
to peer communication and in popularisations. In communication between
scientists in the research journal Science, linguistic metaphors such as
translation, code and message quickly became established and were used “just like
any other scientific concept” (2003: 1254). Knudsen shows how this TEXT
metaphor was “opened up”, that is, extended, explored and re-lexicalised in
popularised accounts, some of which were written by the same scientists.
She cites linguistic metaphors such as read off, dictionary, and spell out from
Scientific American, as well as re-uses of the established scientific terms message,
translate and code. Semino (2008) found the same process in her analysis of a
scientific article about ageing, and a popularised version, which was
published in the New Scientist. The scientists put forward the hypothesis that
as an organism ages, cells become less effective at removing toxins; this is
described using what Semino terms a metaphor of WASTE DISPOSAL. In
the scientists’ texts, the use is fairly limited, while in contrast, the popular
version exploits the mapping creatively and humorously, beginning with a
long description of the writer’s attic, and the junk it contains (2008: 143).
Deignan et al. (2013) analysed a New Scientist article which presented
findings about glaciers alongside the two research articles that it was based
on. The terms equilibrium and balance were used in the research articles, in
the expressions equilibrium line altitude and surface mass balance. These have
technical meanings related to the relationship between ice melting in the
summer and re-accumulating in the winter, and the point on the glacier at
which these occur. The terms tend to be abbreviated to “ELA” and
“SMB”, which suggests that their figurative origin is lost (ibid.). The terms
were used frequently in the research articles, but there were no
exploitations or developments of a balance metaphor. In the New Scientist
popularisation, the terms ELA and SMB were not used, either in full or
abbreviated form. However, the writer used derived terms such as out of
equilibrium, in
(1) glaciers are about 25 percent out of equilibrium (Anathaswamy 2011: 8).
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This expression is not used at all in the research articles that were analysed,
nor in a wider corpus search of academic articles. It appears to have been
creatively coined by the New Scientist writer. The writer also used the balancerelated linguistic metaphor tipping point, in citations such as
(2) Greenland will reach a tipping point in about 30 years (ibid, p. 8)
an expression which again is not used at all in the source research texts. As
was the case for the “junk” metaphors described by Semino, above, the
metaphors used by scientists communicating with each other seem to have
lost any figurative dimension they may have had, while the popular text treats
them creatively.
Another difference in metaphor use between research and popular texts is
function, which I illustrate with an example of two topically-related texts
about climate change. In 2017, an article was published in the peer reviewed
journal Anthropocene Review, entitled “The Anthropocene equation” (Gaffney
& Steffen, 2017). The article proposed an equation to represent the rate of
change to the Earth’s system. The first author, Gaffney, is a science
journalist, while Steffen is a chemist who has published in some of the
leading scientific journals. Gaffney also published a version of the article in
the New Scientist, entitled “Simple equation shows how humanity is trashing
the planet”.
There are differences between the two articles in the functions that
metaphors are used for. The articles contain a number of shared metaphors
that denote scientific and technical concepts; these include drive, driver (an
abstract force that leads to change), baseline (as in baseline data) and instability.
The research article also includes more specialised technical uses of
metaphor, such as feedback(s), interaction, and forcing, which have a denotational,
or referential, function. These include the figurative expression saw-tooth in
the following:
(3) …the Earth System of the Quaternary is typified by saw-tooth oscillations
of glacial-interglacial cycling.
which refers to a strong up-and-down pattern of a line on a graph, to denote
the same phenomenon. This use of saw-tooth is found in a number of texts
in the Oxford English Corpus, either referring to a graph, real or imaginary,
or to the screens on medical instruments to measure heart rates etc. It is
common in scientific texts to find figuratively-used expressions which refer
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to the appearance of a line on a graph, or representation on a diagram to
stand for a trend or distribution, such as curve, steep, climb, falling, peak and
trajectory, as in the following citations, all from specialist academic texts:
(4) At low levels of adoption, the supply curve for adopters is steeper than it is
at higher levels of adoption (Expert corpus; see below)
(5) Each site’s yearly hydrograph was categorized into one of four types
(Simple, Complex, Semi-Complex I or Semi-Complex II) based upon the
visual characteristics of the climbing limb, the peak flow times and the
falling limb. (Expert corpus; see below)
(6) The graph traces the deterministic trajectory from an initial state when the
allele is rare in both populations to when the allele has reached global
fixation. (Genetics online, 10.06.2005)
I regard this as a metonymy from metaphor. The description of aspects of
a graph using terms from the concrete semantic field of rising, falling, and
in the case of trajectory, flying through the air, is metaphorical. The
association of these features of a graph with the changing phenomenon that
they represent is then metonymical.
The related popular article published in the New Scientist contains some
metaphors that denote, in common with the research article, but also
metaphors that appear to have other functions. An analysis of the following
paragraph illustrates this. Metaphors identified using the Metaphor
Identification Procedure (Pragglejaz, 2007) have been underlined:
(7) For the last 2.5 million years, Earth settled into a rather unusual period
of potential instability as we rocked back and forth between ice ages and
intervening warm periods, or interglacials. Far from living on a deeply
resilient planet, we live on a planet with hair triggers. Industrialised
societies are fumbling around with the controls, lulled into a false sense
of security by the deceptive stability of the Holocene, the last 11,700
years. Remarkably and accidentally, we have ejected the Earth system
from the interglacial envelope and are heading into unchartered waters.
(page 2)
The Oxford English Corpus was used as a reference corpus to examine
citations of the underlined metaphors. As expected, a number of them, such
as settled into, resilient and lulled [into a false sense of security] are in very general
use with the same denotational meanings as in this text, and do not appear
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METAPHORS IN TEXTS ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE
to have additional functions in the article. Of interest here, and in contrast
to the metaphors identified in the research article, are the following:
Rocked back and forth
Hair triggers
Fumbling around with the controls
Ejected… envelope
Heading into unchartered waters
These seem to have functions beyond denoting, the first of which is
explanatory, or pedagogical. Rock back and forth in: “We rocked back and forth
between ice ages…” conveys the proposition expressed in the research
article in the sentence discussed above:
(3) the Earth System of the Quaternary is typified by saw-tooth oscillations
of glacial-interglacial cycling.
The metaphor rock back and forth draws on our everyday, bodily experience to
make this accessible to a non-scientific readership (in interesting contrast
with the research article use of saw-tooth) and therefore seems to have a
pedagogical function as well as a denotational one. The paragraph as a whole
summarises material that is covered over several pages and is supported by
detailed references to other research studies in the research article. However,
each of the other metaphors listed above both explains but also adds
additional meaning to the points made in the research article. The point that
human activity is having a major effect on climate, introduced in the
paragraph cited above with “Far from living on a deeply resilient planet…”
is introduced in the research article with the sentence:
(8) However, an entirely new forcing is now driving change in the Earth
System: human activity (H). Although H is a subset of I (internal
dynamics), here we argue that the magnitude, the unique nature of the
forcing in the history of the planet, and the rate have now become so
profound that H deserves to be considered in its own right in the context
of Earth System dynamics.
This text presents an outsider standpoint to human activity, while the
popular article repeatedly writes of we. The human race is talked of
metonymically as taking actions that a single person would: fumbling around,
ejecting, heading to unchartered waters. Each of these actions is also metaphorical,
writing of the changes wrought to the environment and other species by an
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ALICE DEIGNAN
industrialised lifestyle as if they were the physical actions of an individual or
small group of people. As noted above, the research article also uses
metonymy, but from a graph to a phenomenon – that is, using a scientific
artefact to explain a scientific phenomenon, rather than bringing the
discussion into the immediate realm of the human body and human action.
The popular article also uses metaphor to move blame for the crisis away
from humanity; the metaphor hair trigger is used, as part of a claim that the
Earth is a very fragile system. This claim is not made in the research article,
which instead writes of the magnitude of the changes produced by human
activity.
In the title of the popular article: “Simple equation shows how humanity is
trashing the planet”, and the penultimate sentence: “The stakes could not be
higher, yet critical knowledge and action needed for stability is in danger of
becoming collateral damage in today’s war on facts”, the tendency for
metaphors to have a function that encompasses entertaining, dramatizing
and, sometimes, exaggerating, is seen, in expressions such as stakes… high,
collateral damage and war. In my analysis, this has overlapped with the
pedagogic function in some expressions, discussed above. Unsurprisingly,
neither the pedagogic nor the entertaining function was found in the
research article.
4. Science metaphors in school education
Having discussed the form and function of scientific metaphors across
genres, and briefly described a number of studies, I return to the issue raised
in the introduction: the communication of climate change to young people.
In order to investigate this issue, a project team from Leeds and Lancaster
Universities, UK, compiled three corpora, as follows:
Corpus
Contents
Tokens
Expert
Journal articles and policy documents.
509,772
Materials
Texts accessed by young people and their teachers relating to climate change.
260, 679
Interviews
Transcribed interviews with school students aged 11-16.
87,929
Table 1. Climate change corpora from different genres.
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METAPHORS IN TEXTS ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE
The Expert corpus has two sub-corpora of roughly equal sizes. The
academic section consists of articles published in three prestigious journals
in the field: Climate Change, Global Environmental Change and Nature. The team
took advice from climate experts at Leeds and Lancaster Universities on the
choice of these journals. The policy documents section consists of policy
documents from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UK
Department for Environmental, Food and Rural Affairs, Oxfam and other
bodies that comment at a national or international level on climate change.
The Materials corpus consists of texts such as curriculum materials, science
textbooks, revision websites, popular science websites for young people, and
teacher information packs. This was the last corpus to be built, and also the
most complex, as many of the texts are from the internet, or from textbooks,
and are multi-modal. For this project we only analysed text formally, but we
noted that the use of images and sound were also often metaphorical.
The Interviews corpus consists of transcriptions of 41 focus group-style
discussions between one of the project teams and groups of school
students. The students all attended one of the four collaborating secondary
schools in the Yorkshire region (north-east England). The schools are in
different socio-economic areas; and ranged in location from Leeds city
centre, through suburban to rural. All are non-selective, state (i.e. not feepaying) schools, who have links with Leeds University through the latter’s
teacher training work. Students were nominated by their science teachers to
take part, and were interviewed in year groups, that is, each group consisted
of children from the same school year and science class. Ethical approval
was granted through the relevant University of Leeds committee; all
participants gave informed consent, and data were anonymised and stored
securely.
We analysed the data in a variety of ways, for different purposes. To conduct
metaphor research, I used the corpus software Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al.,
2014) to perform word counts, generate concordances and identify frequent
and significant collocates, cross-checking a sample of my analysis with other
team members. This enabled us to compare the three corpora against each
other, and also against two reference corpora, the British National Corpus
and the Oxford English Corpus. I started by using the Word List function
of Sketch Engine to obtain a list of the most frequent words in each of the
three corpora. Our focus was on lexical words rather than grammatical
words such as prepositions. While we acknowledge that prepositions are
often metaphorically used, my initial analyses showed that this is rarely, if
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ALICE DEIGNAN
ever, with meanings specific to the domain of climate science. Having
obtained a word list, in order of frequency, for each of the three corpora, I
concordanced each of the lexical words, or, more precisely, lemmas (i.e. all
inflections of a word), starting with the most frequent. For the two larger
corpora, I analysed concordances down to words that occurred 200 times
per million words, that is, of mid-range frequency. In this way I analysed the
concordance data for several hundred words. I then analysed concordances
for all lexical words in the Interviews corpus down to a raw frequency of 5.
This analysis sought to establish whether words were used with a figurative
meaning or literally. To do this, I used a version of the Metaphor
Identification Procedure (MIP) (Pragglejaz, 2007). MIP stipulates reading
entire texts to determine context, which is clearly not practical for a corpus
of this size, and not possible in any case from the starting point of the
concordance line. However, the subject matter was known, and the genre of
the texts was predictable, so I found that in almost all cases the 80 characters
of context of a concordance line was sufficient to determine whether a word
was being used literally or figuratively, and in the few remaining unclear
cases, a slightly expanded window was enough.
The MIP analysis showed that the majority of frequent lexical words were
used literally. The most time-consuming part of the analysis was where words
were used both literally and metaphorically. This was the case especially for a
set of words describing level, including level itself, high, low, rise, fall and similar
words. These are used in the usual scientific sense, to describe and compare
quantities of abstract entities, including the use described above, related
metonymically to graphical representations of data. Members of this lexical
set are also used literally in climate science, to talk about the sea level. For
words such as these, citations of each meaning were counted carefully. A
smaller number of words were always used metaphorically in the corpora:
frequent examples included impact, scenario, approach and balance. The findings
from previous studies, discussed above, indicated a tendency for specialist
scientific metaphors to be “opened up” (Knudsen, 2003) in popularisations.
Our findings were consistent with this. Our comparative analysis of the
Expert and Materials corpora showed a broad picture in which, in the Expert
corpus, metaphors tended to be found in technical terms or semi-technical
descriptions, while in the Materials corpus they were used for overtly
pedagogic purposes, often being turned into similes, and/or with the grounds
for the metaphor explained. Further details about the Expert and Materials
corpora are discussed in Deignan et al. (2017). I now discuss the examples of
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figurative language that we identified in the corpus of interviews, comparing
these, where relevant, with the other two corpora.
The Interviews corpus was analysed using corpus tools and also thematically.
During the manual thematic analysis, metaphors were again marked up using
the MIP procedure, and I marked up metonyms following Littlemore and
Tagg’s procedure (2016), which is a variant on MIP, based on work by
Biernacka (2013). I found that in the Interview corpus, metaphors were
sometimes used in a similar way to the other corpora. In other citations,
however, they were “opened up” and extended. As shown in Table 2 below,
students tended to favour metaphors whose vehicles are likely to be familiar
objects in the world of an older child or young adult, such as trap, bounce and
blanket. There was some evidence that their understandings of the target
domain were inaccurate as a result of their bringing their own real-world
knowledge to the interpretation of metaphors. I now discuss some specific
examples of this. Table 2 gives the most frequent metaphors in the
Interviews corpus. In a few cases, the same words were also used as similes;
this is shown in column 4. Some of these words were also used literally, but
for clarity, the figures for literal use are not given here.
Rank
Lemma
1
2
3
4
5
5
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
15
15
18
19
20
21
21
22
23
24
24
go
greenhouse
way
cap (in ice-cap)
release
trap
lead (/li:d/)
slow
bounce
point
chain
blanket
rise
level
escape
impact
link
contribute
balance
save
low
footprint
band
play
barrier
scenario
Frequency
as
metaphor
388
161
130
94
89
89
38
36
33
32
30
30
27
23
21
21
21
18
13
11
10
10
5
7
4
5
Frequency as
simile
Figurative uses
per millon words
30
5
3
1
4410.1
2172.2
1478.4
1069
1012.1
1012.1
432.1
409.4
375.3
363.9
341.1
341.1
307
261.5
238.8
238.8
238.8
204.7
147.8
122.3
111.2
111.2
90.9
77.8
66.7
66.7
Table 2. Most frequent metaphors (with similes) in the Interviews corpus.
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The most frequent metaphor in the Interviews corpus was go, which is
accounted for by citations such as the following:
(9)
I think that erm, like the way we’re going and the way the earth’s
changing, it’s possible that like in many years’ time, it might, like…
(10) …because you’re burning trees which err, because of their burning,
err, releases CO2 and then those trees are gone.
(11) Bees are supposed to, erm they were talking about a bit of a problem
with bees, and if bees go, then no plants will get pollinated.
(12) …some animals are going extinct, like polar bears, because they’re losing
where they live.
Despite its frequency, for a number of reasons, go is not the most salient
metaphor in the corpus. Firstly, the use of going to to talk about the future was
included in the figurative counts, but this is clearly not domain-specific, and
might be better considered to be a grammatical use rather than lexical. Only
slightly more domain specific was the frequent use of go up/go down to refer
to temperature. Also, like many frequent words, go is highly polysemous, the
high number of citations in fact reflecting smaller numbers of many
different meanings, each of which, if counted as a separate group, would
appear much lower in the frequency rankings.
Nonetheless, there are points of interest in the concordance data for go.
Citation (9) seems a realisation of a journey mapping, a use that was found
a number of times. With the exception of going to to talk about the future and
go up/go down, the most frequent metaphorical use of go was to talk about
disappearance or extinction, in 24 citations, as exemplified in citations (10)
and (11) above. In addition, there were 16 citations of the collocation go
extinct, as in citation (12). A search of the British National Corpus showed 4
citations of this collocation, compared with 430 for the lemma become with
extinct. In the Interviews corpus there were only 20 citations of the lemma
become with extinct, i.e. in contrast with the BNC, it was slightly less frequent
than go extinct. This is consistent with my perception that go extinct is a
regional and relatively informal use that is over-represented in the speech of
these young people.
The second most frequent metaphor in the Interviews corpus, and most
frequent in the Materials corpus, is greenhouse. This is also used as a simile in
30 citations. As discussed in more detail by Deignan et al. (2017), greenhouse
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METAPHORS IN TEXTS ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE
is used in a highly technical sense in the Expert corpus in collocations such
as greenhouse gases, and almost certainly has no metaphorical meaning for the
readers and writers of the texts in the corpus. In contrast, in the Materials
corpus, attention is drawn to the literal meaning, in citations such as
(13) In a greenhouse, shorter wavelength radiation from the Sun can pass
through the glass. However, longer wavelength thermal radiation is
trapped inside by the glass. So the greenhouse stays warm. Gases in the
atmosphere, such as water vapour, methane and carbon dioxide, act like
the glass.
In the Interviews corpus, there are a number of references to literal
greenhouses, as well as metaphorical, such as:
(14) So the greenhouse effect is like a greenhouse when you walk in, it’s warm
isn’t it cos it, other heat is trapped inside by the sun and then it like
warms it up, and greenhouse gases are like, it’s hard to explain like, the
gases, I can’t really explain it but I know like a greenhouse, it’s almost like
the same as a greenhouse.
There is some evidence that this leads to misunderstandings; for instance,
the Interviews corpus also contains references to glass:
(15) at certain heights the sun is able to get into like the glass, then when it’s
inside it can’t get out cos there’s no, cos there’s no sun to let it get
through from inside. So then when you walk in it’s really warm and
because of that, and it’s like, the earth is covered in like lots of glass
panels but we just can’t see them, because the sun’s projecting into
them. It doesn’t, it won’t come out, it’ll just keep coming in and when
it tries to get out, it’ll just bounce off the roof and down in a
continuous loop.
There are a number of such references in a number of different interviews.
These, and other passages in the corpus, show that some of the students
interviewed are under the erroneous impression that greenhouse gases form
a thin, hard layer round the Earth analogous to panes of glass.
Another very frequent metaphor in the Interviews corpus is trap. This is an
example of a group of metaphors that work by comparing scientific
processes and entities to concrete objects and actions that would be very
familiar in the everyday world of the young people interviewed, like release
(discussed in Deignan et al., 2017) and blanket, discussed below. As shown
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in Table 2, trap was the joint 5th most frequent metaphorically-used lemma
in the Interviews corpus. It occurred in the Expert corpus 10 times with a
metaphorical meaning. 7 of these refer to CO2 being trapped inside fossil
fuels or similar scientific states, while the remaining 3 citations are found
in expressions such as trapped in poverty. In the Expert corpus, the frequency
is just 19.6 per million words, contrasted with 1012.1 in the Interviews
corpus. In the Materials corpus, trap is mostly used to talk about heat being
trapped by greenhouse gases. Occasionally it is used to describe bubbles
trapped in ice, which are then used to analyse the composition of air
historically. In the Materials corpus, metaphorical trap occurs in 406
citations per million words, far more frequent than in the Expert corpus,
but less than in the Interviews corpus, where it occurs 1,012.1 times per
million words.
The following citations from the interviews are typical. All four of the
schools used are represented.
(16) it’s like the world like trapped in a giant greenhouse and it’s just getting
hotter and hotter.
(17) when the sun rays shine upon us, they get trapped in the atmosphere cos
those gases trap them, and that heats the atmosphere up
(18) it’s almost having tinfoil on the whole entire planet because it’s keeping
the heat in and it’s not letting any other heat erm, out, so we’re
completely trapped in our own eco-system, and it’s really hard to change
because of all these greenhouse gases, it’s trapping us slowly and slowly,
it’s making us more hot and more humid, and it’s trapping us in.
(19) The earth is like the plant, and the CO2 is making like a glass shelter
around it, and it’s trapping heat in.
It can be seen that while the metaphor is used in all three corpora, albeit with
different frequency levels, it is used to talk about different entities. In the
Interviews corpus, the entity which traps is the atmosphere, CO2, or,
occasionally, the ozone layer (several students confused what they had
learned about the ozone layer and the greenhouse effect). The object of trap
was variously the planet, heat or sunrays. Despite minor variations, there
seems to be a consistent scenario in which an outer shell around the planet
keeps something in, preventing escape. This is more or less consistent with
the use in the Materials corpus, but the students both over-simplify the
meaning and extend it. As a result, the Interviews use contains some slight
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METAPHORS IN TEXTS ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE
scientific inaccuracies, as seen in the above citations, for example, that the
planet is trapped, rather than heat.
The students’ use of blanket shows the same tendencies. Figurative blanket is
not found in the Expert corpus. It is found in the Materials corpus 31 times,
equivalent to 118.9 times per million words, in contrast with a frequency of
341 times per million words in the Interviews corpus. In the Materials
corpus, only 6 citations are metaphorical, with the remaining 26 citations
being similes, in citations such as:
(20) Methane, together with other greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide
contribute to global warming by acting like a blanket surrounding the
whole planet.
The proportion of similes to metaphors is almost the exact reverse in the
Interviews corpus, with 30 metaphors and 5 similes. Examples of each are:
(21) When the weather’s getting warmer and it’s like a blanket of carbon
dioxide around the earth. And it’s caused by carbon dioxide from cars
and methane, and factories.
(22) …some gases like are stopping the erm heat, sun from bouncing,
because when it shines in onto the earth, it comes down, but then the
blanket of pollution and greenhouse gases would just stop the heat
from coming back through so then it’ll get really hot.
(In the Interviews data, it was sometimes difficult to distinguish simile from
metaphor because of a tendency for the students to use like as a very
frequent discourse marker, and not necessarily a marker of simile. I relied on
my experience of working with this age group to help me disambiguate these
uses). In a number of citations in the Interviews corpus, there is some
extension of the metaphor, as in the following citation, where a student talks
about not being able to take off the blanket.
(23) …a giant blanket around the earth, keeping it warm and even too
warm, and we can’t take that blanket off.
Here, as for greenhouse, the students have brought extended meaning to a
metaphor that they have encountered in pedagogical materials. The students
seemed to have noted a metaphor that resonated with their everyday
experience, and that they used it with much greater frequency than it is found
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in the other corpora, perhaps because of this resonance. Further, they tend
to reinterpret the metaphorical use, bringing their experience to it and
extending it creatively, thus bringing in slight inaccuracies.
Some of the metaphors used by the students did not occur in the other two
corpora, or not with the same meaning. This was the case for bounce, band and
barrier, as used in the following citations from the Interviews corpus.
(24) …there’s lots of CO2 coming like out of cars and things, and it’s
bounced its erm, some of the warmth is bouncing back onto the earth, it’s
like erm, it’s warming up places that erm, like places like Antarctica
where like polar bears live and things.
(25) …there’s like a band around the world and it like lets some of the CO2
out.
(26) It’s like bad air that we create, it’s getting trapped, erm, and it’s like a
barrier for the sun so things are heating up a lot quicker, especially the
earth.
As for the examples previously discussed, the literal referents of all of these
metaphors would be familiar to students from their everyday lives. They may
represent the students’ attempts to make sense of the diagrams that feature
in many websites and textbooks, in which greenhouse gases are represented
as a discrete layer around the planet (a band or barrier), deflecting heat (which
bounces back to earth). As for the previous metaphors, this leads to some
over-simplification of the science.
5. Symbols of climate change for students
In my manual analysis of the Interviews corpus, I also attempted to identify
the central images and entities that students use to refer to the wider
problem of climate change. As would be expected, the image of the polar
bear is highly salient to the school students, and they referred to this animal
in 35 of the 41 interviews. Polar bears were referred to especially when
students were asked what climate change is and what the main effects are.
Responses to these questions included:
(27) Err, climate change, it’s mostly happening in the ice-caps and it’s
destroying all the habitats of the polar bears, and they’re running out of
space to hunt the food and look after the cubs.
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METAPHORS IN TEXTS ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE
(28) Erm like in the Arctic, with polar bears all the ice-caps are all melting so
they’re like migrating a bit South to different countries and erm, it’s
causing like havoc in little villages around.
(29) It’s erm, it can cause the ice-caps to melt I think and erm, which can
cause sea-levels to rise. Erm, flooding in areas, erm, some animals are
going extinct, like polar bears, because they’re losing where they live.
Students in three of the four schools also mentioned penguins, the second
most frequent animal to be mentioned after polar bears. [Polar] bears is the
most significant collocate of penguin, because they are often mentioned
together, as in the following point about the effect of climate change, made
by a 14 year old student:
(30) It can affect like anything that is adapted to that environment sort of
thing. Like polar bears and penguins.
When asked to say how she would explain climate change and its effects to
a younger pupil, one 12-year-old female student said the following:
(31) imagine you got a penguin and that penguin lives on Antarctica on a like
massive sheet of ice which can melt easily as the temperatures go up…
because it’s getting warm and the ice is melting, and let’s say it’s getting
warm, the ice is melting and there’s a seal over here trying to eat the
penguin but can’t go on land, well can’t move from land that well, but
then the ice is gradually getting shorter and shorter, and then the seal
has more water to move in, and then because of us, the ice is gone, and
the penguin has to swim, but it can’t swim forever, it can’t hold its
breath forever, and then the seal eats the penguin.
Students produced various narratives of this kind, describing how the
habitats and lives of polar bears, penguins and seals were threatened, and the
food chain was disrupted. In general, animals tended to be mentioned before
people as victims of climate change, and seem to act as symbols of the
problem.
6. Conclusion
In this article, I have argued that scientific metaphors are never neutral. Like
metaphors in other genres and register, they have entailments which can be
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ALICE DEIGNAN
ideological and influence behaviour. This was the case for example, for the
“balance of nature” metaphor. Scientific metaphors have different functions
in different text types, popularisations tending to use metaphor for
explanatory, dramatization and entertainment purposes. Educational
materials for young people use metaphor as a pedagogic device, and often
spell this out with simile. The findings of this study were consistent with
work by writers such as Knudsen (2003) and Semino (2008) in showing that
texts written for non-specialists tended to open up scientific metaphors. This
study also attempted to find out how the users of such texts, young people,
reproduced these metaphors. It has found that they further extended and
opened them up, bringing their own concrete experience to their
interpretation, and that they brought their own metaphors to their attempts
to explain their understandings.
Acknowledgements
The research into young people’s understandings of climate change
described here is part of a larger project called “Translating Science for
Young People”, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK
(grant number AH/M003809/1). I am grateful to the other investigators
Elena Semino (Lancaster University) and Indira Banner (Leeds University),
to the Research Fellow, Shirley-Anne Paul (Leeds University), who
conducted the interviews, to the young people who took part in the
interviews, and to their science teachers.
Article history:
Received 16 May 2017
Received in revised form 17 September 2017
Accepted 17 September 2017
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Alice Deignan is a Professor of Applied Linguistics in the School of
Education, University of Leeds, UK. She works with corpora to investigate
lexical meaning, especially focussing on metaphor and metonymy. She is
interested in cross-register variation, and its implications for non-expert
language users such as young people and language learners. She is author of
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and Elena Semino).
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