Disseminating ‘green’ knowledge: patterns, meaning and metaphors in the discourse of eco-cities

This research aims to investigate and compare academic discourse in the field of the environment and its integration into urban planning, more specifically it explores scientific discourse related to ecological cities (eco-cities) to show how ‘green’ concerns are communicated in academic research journals. The point of departure is the environment, in terms of the ‘greening’ of cities and society, e.g. green capitalism, green heart of the city. As clusters or lexical bundles (Hyland, 2008) are fundamental components of language, the aim is to investigate how these phraseological units are not only central to the creation of ‘green’ academic discourse, but they also offer an important means of differentiating the ideology and stance of the scholars and role players in the discourse community. Thus, the research is based on two sub-corpora (approximately 300,000 words); one sub-corpus comprising research papers predominantly related to urban environmental concerns, e.g. Journal of Environmental Sciences, and the other consisting of research articles from the architectural and urban planning perspective, e.g. Journal of Architecture and Urban planning. Although both sub-corpora focus on the challenge of ecological cities, which acts as a common denominator, the same environmental reality may be differently conceptualized according to the discipline and discourse community. This is revealed through the lexico-semantic pragmatic choices forming the rhetorical patterns. Thus, the analysis explores the extent to which the two discourse communities (that of environmental sciences and that of urban and architectural planning) share traits and to what extent they differ. The paper pays particular attention to the patterns used to communicate and disseminate information metaphorically, not only through explicit metaphors, e.g. forest city, but also through metaphorical markers or metalanguage, e.g. like, as if. (Goatly, 1997).