Analysing the environmental websites of the world’s greatest polluters: a multimodal ecolinguistic approach

Abstract

This paper develops a visual analysis of the environmental webpages of 20 global companies, considered to be the world’s greatest polluters in terms of their carbon emissions into the atmosphere. Our aim is to determine how these companies build a public reputation as environmentally concerned agents in relation to climate change. The analysis is based on the theoretical and methodological propositions put forward by Critical Discourse Analysis, ecolinguistics and multimodal analysis. More specifically, we take into account Kress and van Leeuwen’s grammar of visual design, which enables us to describe and classify the images on webpages and to determine how these images are used to enforce certain narratives and ideologies. The paper also develops a comparative study of promotional strategies and the level of development and communicative efficiency of the sustainability webpages of Western and non-Western companies, on the one hand, and of global companies and environmental NGOs on the other.

Keywords:

• Climate change
• corporate discourse
• promotional discourse
• multimodal analysis
• critical discourse analysis
• ecolinguistics

JEL CLASSIFICATIONS:

• L20
• L31
• L33

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 On the persuasive force of rhetorical strategies in business contexts see, for example, Díez-Prados (2019); Fernández-Vázquez and Álvarez-Delgado (2020a, 2020b); Fernández-Vázquez and Sancho-Rodríguez (2020a, 2020b); García-Gómez (2018).

Additional information

Funding

This investigation forms part of the long-term research Project ‘EMOtion and language at work’: The discursive emotive/evaluative FUNction in different texts and contexts within corporate and institutional work: PROject PERsuasion (EMOFUNDETT: PROPER)’, financed by the Ministry of Science and Technology in Spain (reference FFI2013-47792-C2-2-P). We would like to thank our colleague Elena Ortiz Carrasco for her help in performing intercoder reliability tests.