THE SYNTAX OF CLIMATE CHANGE: SYNTACTIC MEANS IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF GRETA THUNBERG’S COMMUNITY IDENTITY ON FACEBOOK
THE SYNTAX OF CLIMATE CHANGE: SYNTACTIC MEANS IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF GRETA THUNBERG’S COMMUNITY IDENTITY ON FACEBOOK

Summary/Abstract: The Syntax of Climate Change: Syntactic Means in the Construction of Greta Thunberg’s Community Identity on Facebook. It is argued that the identity of an online community (e.g., a Facebook community) is manifested by linguistic devices, such as syntactic means (Androutsopoulos 2015; Blumenfeld-Jones 2022; Kapranov 2019). This contention is explored in the study that is further presented and discussed in the article. The study seeks to identify syntactic means, in particular dependent clauses, which are involved in the construction of Greta Thunberg’s community identity on Facebook. Greta Thunberg, a famous climate change activist from Sweden, has a public account on Facebook that is followed by a substantial number of Facebook users, who, presumably, share her views on climate change, sustainability, and other environmental issues. It is assumed in the study that Greta Thunberg’s status updates on her public Facebook account could be characterised by syntactic means that facilitate the construction of the climate activists’ community identity. In order to verify the assumption, a corpus of Greta Thunberg’s status updates on Facebook was collected and analysed by the software program L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer (Lu 2010). The computer-assisted analysis was supplemented by a manual procedure of identifying the types of dependent clauses in the corpus. The results of the corpus analysis revealed that Greta Thunberg’s community construction on Facebook was facilitated by such syntactic means as dependent clauses, in particular non-finite, adverbial, and relative clauses. The findings were further discussed in the article through the lens of the construction of community identity.

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