"We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator"

Rhetorical Strategies in Climate Crisis Narratives between Dialogism and Polyphony

Lecture by Daria Evangelista (visiting researcher, Department of Communication).

The statement that opens the title is poignant: its expressivity is enhanced by the use of reported speech, the inclusive “we” at its very beginning, and the long, creative metaphor that conveys a sense of urgency and implicitly criticizes our collective lifestyle. The person who pronounced it is UN Secretary-General António Guterres during his talk at COP27 in 2022. Since then, it has been quoted in numerous newspaper articles around the world. This case represents just one of the many examples of how narratives can serve as powerful tools in constructing effective awareness-raising communication about the climate crisis. The presentation explores how such narratives, particularly those produced by institutions and media outlets, deploy rhetorical strategies to raise awareness and persuade audiences of the pressing nature of the climate emergency.

Focusing on the textual features of dialogism and polyphony in written text genres in Italian, the study analyses how climate crisis narratives create a multiplicity of voices and perspectives within climate crisis discourses. Strategies under examination include the use of reported speech to introduce alternative viewpoints; the figure of the allegory to sustain extended metaphoric frames; the employment of second-person pronouns (“you”) or inclusive first-person plural forms (“we”) to engage the audience directly; and other linguistic features that potentially enhance persuasiveness.

Drawing on theoretical frameworks from rhetoric, argumentation theory, and text linguistics, the analysis categorises and interprets these strategies within their context, offering insight into their role within text structure and their contribution to the argumentative construction of concepts such as climate urgency and agency.

The paper presents partial results from a two-year postdoctoral mobility research project titled The Awareness-Raising Discourse about the Climate Crisis. An Analysis of Written Texts in Italian at the Interplay between Rhetoric, Argumentation Theory and Text Linguistics, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

 

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