6th International Seminar on Linguistics (2023)

For many endangered cultures, the prospects for language survival are linked to efforts to secure land tenure. Environmental personhood has emerged as a powerful legal concept in recent years, proposed by analogy with corporate personhood (Gordon, 2019). In Ecuador, a new constitution recognized the rights of Pachamama ‘Mother Earth’ in 2008; in New Zealand, the Te Urewera forest was recognized as a legal entity in 2014; and in Canada, the Magpie River became the first to be granted juridical status as a person in 2021. In major environmental legal cases invoking personhood for landscapes on the basis of indigenous beliefs, one set of arguments yet to be systematically advanced involves the encoding of features such as animacy and personhood in indigenous languages. While corporate personhood has for centuries served as a legal metaphor, environmental personhood is in fact literal for many indigenous communities: personhood is not restricted to humans, nor animacy to animals (Descola, 2013). Environmental personhood may be linguistically encoded through animacy hierarchies, numerical classifiers, direct object marking, relative pronouns, or verbs of existence. In this talk, I report on a crosslinguistic project examining the linguistic underpinnings of personhood in communities seeking rights for sentient landscapes, with a view to identifying untapped potential for legal evidence relying on grammatical reflections of animacy.

During coronavirus pandemic,which is coined to Wuhan, Hubei province, China, in December 2019, and even post pandemic , researches and writings have highlighted the role of corona virus in enhancing man environmental awareness.The current qualitative article aims to answer one question :In the scenario of university classroom , how could the teacher promote environmental awareness among their students during coronavirus pandemic? The participants were 19 students, Third Stage , at the Department of English in the College of Arts , in the University of Mosul , Mosul , Nineveh, Iraq.The corpus included 19 reports which the participants submitted to the teacher as an assignment under the title “Writing a Report on Magazine Article” posted on Google Classroom (July 9th,2021) . As environmental hazards are parts of the daily stories we live by, the participants were asked to write a report on any environmental issue given in National Geographic Magazine.The Class was Research Methodology given in 2 hours a week online as an item in the academic syllabus for Third Stage .A checklist was adopted as a tool in scaling the environmental awareness among Iraqi University Students taking into consideration the environmental issues in the original article , the title ,and the extracts that mostly attracted the participant’s attention. Results revealed that Global warming ,Pollution, Animals Extinction, Nature Sustainability captured the participants’ eyes. The article ended up with a section including some suggestions and recommendations for environmental education.

Discourse Studies have a strong tradition in Latin American universities. Beginning in the sixties, Discourse Analysis approaches, even before CDA, introduced a critical turn from Linguistics and Semiotics that crossed Social Sciences and established a new perspective. Ecolinguistics and environmental studies, on the other hand, pose a different approach in academic fields, not very developed in the region. As a theoretical approach, Ecolinguistics has found a hard path to establish itself as a discipline in the universities of the region. In this work we aim to analyse the development of Critical Discourse Studies and Ecolinguistics in Latin America to present a possible explanation about the difficulties Ecolinguists have found in the region to introduce their scope in formal academic institutions and why Critical Discourse Analysis have remained far from the eco-perspectives in South America. We argue that CDA has not broken the Eurocentric vision or the environmental perspectives the anthropocentrism and industrial fatalism of the dominant discourses pose. Due to the particular Latin American context, issues approached keep an anthropocentric perspective while theoretical frames present a Eurocentric thinking. In this context, critical Ecolinguistics, along with gender studies, may present an alternative perspective on human-nonhuman-nature relations.