Speakers
Description
Terminology within the domain of environmental economics, a rapidly growing and changing sub-discipline of economics concerned with environmental issues, has been understudied in the literature on domain-specific languages. While, on the one hand, it presents the common features of specialized vocabulary, i.e., monoreferentiality, precision, economy and objectivity (Gotti, 2008; Scarpa, 2020), it also has its own peculiarities because it lies at the intersection among different fields, not just economics and environmental science, but also law, commerce and business. Hence its hybrid and complex cognitive nature, often blending concepts imported from unrelated domains. The name itself of an emerging subfield of environmental economics, i.e., envirodevonomics, studying environmental quality in developing countries (Greenstone & Kelsey, 2015), is a case in point, as it creatively blends words referring to multiple domains of knowledge.
The aim of this presentation is twofold. First, it intends to illustrate the features of a newly created trilingual (English-Italian-Spanish) glossary of environmental economics terms which will soon be made available on Lexonomy (Méchura, 2017; Rambousek, Jakubicek, & Kosem, 2021). The termbase consists of approximately 1,000 items automatically extracted from a two-million word corpus (ENCO Corpus) compiled specifically for this research. The corpus includes academic papers published in journals of environmental economics freely accessible online and public reports from government agencies and companies, providing additional context and depth from outside the academic world. Although some lexicographic resources in the field of environmental economics already exist (e.g., Acks, 1997; Markandya et al, 2001), they are only monolingual, somewhat dated or just in printed form. In today’s mobile society, however, there is a need for easily
accessible, updatable, electronic dictionaries (Fuertes Olivera, 2018; Jackson, 2018) and multilingual termbases to be used also for translation purposes and in the context of specialized language teaching/learning. After presenting a demo of our English-Italian-Spanish glossary of environmental economics terminology and discussing the similarities and differences with IATE (Interactive Terminology for Europe), EU’s terminology
management system, we aim to examine the different term formation patterns in the three languages, with a focus on their cognitive implications. In particular, we will show how meaning construction is subject to varying conceptual structures (Faber Benítez, 2009), frames (Fillmore, 1982; 1985; Lakoff, 2004; 2010) and ideologies (Liu, Lyu, & Zheng, 2021) in the three languages under investigation. The interpretation of the compound term carbon footprint, for instance, is possible by virtue of a metaphor, whereby footprint, which activates the walking frame, is understood as the ‘impact that our actions have on the environment’ due to carbon dioxide emissions associated with human activity. Through
calquing, both Italian and Spanish employ similar metaphoric expressions, i.e., impronta di carbonio and huella de carbono, respectively. In other cases, though, the meaning construction dynamics are different in the three languages. The term phase-out, originating from the field of physics which is still indirectly evoked, in the expression coal phase-out (i.e., the gradual elimination of coal) does not have exact counterparts in Italian or Spanish: eliminazione pprox.ng del carbone (Italian) and pprox. gradual del pprox (Spanish) are based on a paraphrase and are consequently less technical. The opposite scenario may also be observed, i.e., environmental economics terms in either Italian or Spanish sometimes exhibit a higher level of precision and a more restricted scope of application: the English term greenwashing is rather generic, as its meaning shares a conceptual link with other metaphorical uses of ‘washing’ in contexts beyond environmental concerns (e.g., whitewashing, covering up crimes and forms of corruption; pinkwashing or rainbow washing, attempting to benefit from the support of LGBTQA+
rights; sportswashing, investing in sports to promote a country’s reputation while redirecting public attention away from unethical conduct; and so forth). Its equivalents in both Spanish and Italian are instead based on more concrete metaphors: the Spanish equivalents ecoimpostura, ecoblanqueo and blanqueo verde specifically activate the (il)legal(ity) frame, while both ecologismo/ambientalismo di facciata in Italian and ecopostureo in Spanish explicitate the notion of something deceptive or inauthentic.
The ultimate goal of the present study is to provide an initial multilingual representation of terminology organization and of the recurrent patterns of knowledge modelling in the specific domain of environmental economics.
