36.1643, Calls: Lexis - "The Words about Climate Change" (Jrnl)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-36-1643. Wed May 28 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.1643, Calls: Lexis - "The Words about Climate Change" (Jrnl)

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Date: 23-May-2025
From: Denis Jamet-Coupé [denis.jamet at univ-lyon3.fr]
Subject: Lexis - "The Words about Climate Change" (Jrnl)


Journal: Lexis - Journal in English Lexicology
Issue: The Words about Climate Change
Call Deadline: 31-Aug-2025

Lexis – Journal in English Lexicology – will publish its 2nd special
issue of the “Words about…” series in 2026. It will be co-edited by
Camille Biros (Université Grenoble Alpes, France – ILCEA4), Denis
Jamet-Coupé (Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3, France – CEL and
University of Arizona, USA) and Adeline Terry (Université Jean Moulin
Lyon 3, France – CEL) and will deal with the topic “Words about
Climate Change”.
Words about Climate Change
The 2nd issue of the “Words about...” series hosted by Lexis – Journal
in English Lexicology focuses on “Words about Climate Change”.
Climate change has become a major concern and a central, topical issue
in our modern world and is not restricted to environmental studies
such as biology, earth system science, air quality, solar physics,
glaciology, land use, ecosystem, water, to name but a few. Linguistics
also has its say, as clearly demonstrated by the emergence of
ecolinguistics (Lechevrel [2008; 2012]; Stibbs [2021]). Considering
climate change through its lexis and terminology should provide
insights into how knowledge is established, communicated and distorted
in this highly mediatized scientific field. Because of its
interdisciplinary nature and the fact that international institutions
had a central role in establishing it as a separate field of
scientific inquiry, climate change can be seen as a non-prototypical
specialized domain (neither disciplinary nor professional). This
interdisciplinarity nature and the International Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC)’s pivotal role in establishing widely accepted results
in the field and the ways of speaking about them has exerted a
profound influence not only on the terminology employed but also on
the broader depiction of the problem across diverse contexts (Bureau
[2023]). The naming of the scientific domain itself has been a topic
of debate. For some, in particular those that question the results of
the IPCC, climate change refers to any climatic variation, whether it
is caused by human activity or not. Other terms like “global warming”
or “greenhouse effect” could be used to highlight the essential role
of emissions produced by extractivist technologies in triggering the
phenomenon. For others, “climate change” is a term that fails to
highlight the devastating consequences and terms such as “climate
crisis” or “climate disruption” should rather be favored.
An inquiry into the most appropriate words to name the phenomena can
be extrapolated to all disciplines, thereby prompting a reevaluation
of the limitations of language in its current form to represent how
deeply it is likely to affect human social, political, economic and
cultural organizations. It is reflected through a high degree of
terminological and lexical innovation to consider new relationships
between humans and their environment (the debated term of
“anthropocene” is an example) or new emotions (ecoanxiety,
solastalgia). In this context it is not surprising to find that
metaphors are highly used, both to try and explain the phenomenon, its
consequences and potential solutions (tipping point, carbon sink,
adaptation pathway) and to defend ideas through their argumentative
potential in a debated field (Augé [2023]). Euphemisms or hyperbolic
expressions can also be considered for their argumentative or
persuasive potential (climate variability or climate crisis instead of
climate change).
If terminological and lexical variability can be observed in a
monolingual context through diatopic, diachronic, diaphasic and/or
diastratic differences (Coseriu [1974]), a layer of complexity is
added in a multilingual context. As it is the language most used in
international scientific publications, English is the preferred
language when it comes to creating scientific terminology; therefore
most scientific climate change terms are created in English first.
Because of phenomena like borrowing and lack of equivalence the
circulation of these terms and the knowledge they carry into other
languages may be challenging and lead to delayed access to climate
change science for a wider audience of non-English speakers. Specific
cultural understandings of climate phenomena also influence what the
most appropriate ways of naming and proposing solutions in different
parts of the world are (Brüggemann & Rödder [2020]).
Both diachronic and synchronic analyses are welcome. All
methodological approaches will be considered as long as they deal with
the lexicological dimension of words, terms, multi-word units and
expressions about climate change. The present issue welcomes all
articles on the following topics:
Terminology:
 - Determinologization and terminological diffusion: how do words
about climate change go from (highly) specialized to standard /
general languages? How do they propagate in standard English?
 - Levels of specialization and interdisciplinarity: are there
predominant links between conceptual domains to coin words about
climate change?
 - What is the role of metaphorical language in the creation of words
about climate change? Is it purely terminological? Didactic?
Persuasive?, etc.
 - Can metaphors be an impediment to the perception and comprehension
of climate change?
Neology:
 - What type of words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, phrases,
etc.) are predominantly utilized in the lexicon of climate
change-related terminology?
 - Do certain word formation processes exhibit a higher degree of
prevalence in the lexicon of climate change compared to others?
 - Are words about climate change predominantly generated through
lexical or semantic neology?
 - What are the main neological functions of words related to climate
change?
 - Are certain word formation processes more productive in the coinage
of climate change-related vocabulary than others, both in terms of
time and space? Do certain word formation processes demonstrate a
higher degree of creativity?
 - Does hypostatization (Schmid [1998; 2008]) – i.e. “the combination
of conceptual partitioning and ascription of entityhood effected by
words” (Schmid [1998]) play a role in the creation of climate
change-related words?
 - Which source domains are the most prolific in terms of lexical
creation with regard to metaphorical climate change-related words?
 - Which types of words are subject to extinction due to climate
change? Does climate change have an impact on the disappearance of
existing lexis?
Evaluation and A:xiology
 - Are words about climate change, purportedly motivated by
terminological imperatives, inherently neutral, objective terms, or
are they subject to evaluative and axiological influences?
 - Do words about climate change demonstrate particular semantic
prosodies, that is, discernible evaluative polarities?
 - Do euphemisms play a role in the creation and/or evolution of
climate change-related words according to different temporal,
geographic, speaker, stylistic, and register characteristics? Does
taboo play a role in the creation of climate-change related words?
Multilingual Approaches:
 - In the context of borrowing, are there some languages that are more
frequently utilized than others for the purpose of coining words about
climate change?
 - Might cultural particularities and/or a paucity of semantically
equivalent words impede the process of borrowing and utilizing such
terms?
 - In what ways do institutional settings and communicative objectives
influence translation practices regarding climate words?
Discursive Approaches:
 - Are there certain discursive forms that are predominantly
associated with discourses on climate change?
 - If such a phenomenon exists, what are the characteristics of these
discourses, and what are the underlying reasons for their prevalence?
 - Given that climate change is a shared global cause, terminology
should transcend regional differences, but is this really the case?
Are there cases of diatopic variation?
The list above consists of only a few suggestions and is by no means
exhaustive. In this issue, we welcome all contributions that deal with
the words about climate change, their creation, evolution and
propagation.
Selected References:
Aguiar, R., A. Carrington & H. Wang. 2018. ReAcclimate: The new
climate change lexicon. cs229.stanford.edu.
Augé, Anaïs. 2023. Metaphor and argumentation in climate change
discourse. New York: Routledge.
Brüggemann, M. & S. Rödder (eds.). 2020. Global warming in local
discourses: How communities around the world make sense of climate
change. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers.
Bureau, Pauline. 2023. Variation terminologique et néologie dans le
domaine du changement climatique. Thèse de doctorat, Université
Grenoble Alpes, soutenue le 29 novembre 2023.
Coseriu, Eugenio. 1974 [1958]. Synchronie, Diachronie und Geschichte:
das Problem des Sprachwandels. München: Finks.
Domingues, J. M. 2023. Climate change and its lexicon: An analytical
and critical view. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and
Society 36(2). 163–178.
Fagbola, T. M., A. Abayomi, M. B. Mutanga & V. Jugoo. 2021.
Lexicon-based sentiment analysis and emotion classification of climate
change related tweets. In International Conference on Soft Computing
and Pattern Recognition, 637–646. Cham: Springer International
Publishing.
Fisichelli, N. A., G. W. Schuurman & C. H. Hoffman. 2016. Is
‘resilience’ maladaptive? Towards an accurate lexicon for climate
change adaptation. Environmental Management 57(4). 753–758.
Francœur, Aline. 2022. Entre climato-alarmistes et climato-dénégateurs
: Une saga néologique de notre temps. Néologica 16. Néologie et
Environnement.
Fusco, E. J., B. G. Falk, P. J. Heimowitz, D. Lieurance, E. W.
Parsons, C. M. Rottler et al. 2024. The emerging invasive species and
climate-change lexicon. Trends in Ecology & Evolution.
Lechevrel, Nadège. 2008. L’approche écologique en linguistique : le
cas de l’écolinguistique.
Lechevrel, Nadège. 2012. Les approches écologiques en linguistique :
Enquête critique. Coll. “Sciences du langage Carrefour et Points de
vue’. Academia Bruylant.
Schmid, Hans-Jörg. 1998. Constant and ephemeral hypostatization:
thing, problem and other “shell nouns”. In Bernard Caron (ed.).
Proceedings of the 16th international congress of linguists. (Paris,
July 22-25 1997, CD-ROM: Elsevier).
Schmid, Hans-Jörg. 2008. New Words in the Mind: Concept-formation and
Entrenchment of Neologisms. Anglia. Journal of English Philology
126(1). 1-36. https://doi.org/10.1515/angl.2008.002
Sham, N. M. & A. Mohamed. 2022. Climate change sentiment analysis
using lexicon, machine learning and hybrid approaches. Sustainability
14(8). 4723.
Stibbe, Arran. 2021. Ecolinguistics: Language, ecology and the stories
we live by. New York: Routledge.
How to Submit:
Please clearly indicate the title of the paper and include an abstract
between 3,000 and 6,000 characters (including spaces) as well as a
list of relevant keywords and references. All abstract and paper
submissions will be anonymously peer-reviewed (double-blind peer
reviewing) by an international scientific committee composed of
specialists in their fields. Papers will be written preferably in
English or occasionally in French.
Manuscripts may be rejected, accepted subject to revision, or accepted
as such. The contributions will not exceed 55,000 signs.
Submissions (abstracts and articles) will be uploaded onto the
journal’s submission platform. If you encounter any problem, please
send a message to Lexis.
Deadlines:
 - May 2025: Call for papers
 - August 31, 2025: Deadline for submitting abstracts to Lexis via the
journal’s submission platform
 - September 2025: Evaluation Committee’s decisions notified to
authors
 - February 1, 2026: Deadline for submitting papers via the journal’s
submission platform (Guidelines for submitting articles:
https://journals.openedition.org/lexis/1000)
 - March and April 2026: Proofreading of papers by the Evaluation
committee
 - June and July 2026: Authors’ corrections
 - September 1, 2026: Deadline for sending in final versions of papers

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics
                     Lexicography
                     Morphology
                     Semantics
                     Text/Corpus Linguistics

Subject Language(s): English (eng)




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