Environmental Communication and Metaphors: The Case of Italian Blogs

Over the last decade, an increasing number of academic studies have placed emphasis on the use of metaphors in communication about environmental issues. Scholarly research has investigated the use of metaphors to frame climate change in different types of communication in English (Niebert and Gropengiesser 2013, 2014; Shaw and Nerlich 2015; Atanasova and Koteyko 2017; Deignan 2017; Kapranov 2017; Deignan et al. 2019). In recent years, we have also witnessed a growing interest in the study of metaphors in web-mediated environmental communication (Atanasova 2019; Augé 2022). Scholarly interest has been shown in the analysis of blogging as environmental communication (Merry 2010; Elgesem et al. 2015; Joosse and Brydges 2018). Drawing on the research strands outlined so far, this paper focuses on three Italian environmental blogs written by different types of professionals (e.g., copywriters, television hosts, journalists, and students) and examines how they use metaphor in their discussion. From a methodological perspective, the investigation adopts a corpus-assisted discourse analysis approach (Partington 2013) and aims at exploring the metaphors used by bloggers to promote ecological behaviours. The present investigation assumes that metaphors are a matter of thought and not just of words (Lakoff, Johnson 1980), and hence, it considers conceptual metaphors – the understanding of a more abstract conceptual domain (target domain) in terms of a more concrete conceptual one (source domain) – as underlining cognitive mappings for verbal and pictorial realisations of metaphors. Within this perspective, the analysis focuses on visual and verbal metaphors in Italian environmental blogs. In order to identify verbal metaphors, an adapted version of the MIP(VU) (Metaphor Identification Procedure, Pragglejaz Group 2007; Metaphor Identification Procedure Vrije Universiteit, Steen et al. 2010) was used. As regards verbal metaphors, a large variety was found and presented under specific semantic domains: war and violence, people, cleaning, health, business, food, among others. As for visual metaphors, they were used primarily to convey the importance of changing human consumption habits to save the planet, a message that is found throughout the analysis of both verbal and visual metaphors, which both performed a crucial argumentative function in the environmental posts analysed.