[Corpora-List] Fwd: increasing use of "sustainable"

[Alon Lischinsky]

On 2012/1/23 Angus Grieve-Smith <grvsmth at panix.com> wrote:

>     Can you find something wrong with this picture?

I don't suppose you mean the obvious fact that trends such as these
are not linear; I think Randall is well-aware of the fact, and is only
using the striking extrapolation for comedic effect.

On 2012/1/24 Oakey, David [ENGL] <djoakey at iastate.edu> wrote:
> Just a comment – what do we usefully learn about usage from graphs of single wordform frequencies? To me, a single wordform frequency-focused approach doesn’t show much more than whether a wordform becomes more or less frequently used. A design engineer once asked me “how long have people been using green and sustainable with an environmental meaning?” and wasn’t too impressed with the plain frequency results.

There's already some good work done on the contextualised meaning of
'sustainable'/'sustainability':

* Laine, M. (2005). Meanings of the term `sustainable development’ in
{F}innish corporate disclosures. Accounting Forum, 29(4), 395-413.
doi:10.1016/j.accfor.2005.04.001
* Laine, M. (2010). Towards Sustaining the Status Quo: Business Talk
of Sustainability in Finnish Corporate Disclosures 1987–2005. European
Accounting Review, 19(2), 247-274. doi:10.1080/09638180903136258
* Mahlberg, M. (2007). Lexical items in discourse: identifying local
textual functions of sustainable development. In M. Hoey, M. Mahlberg,
M. Stubbs, & W. Teubert (Eds.), Text, discourse and corpora: theory
and analysis (pp. 191-218). London: Continuum.

Cheers,

A.

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