The Role of the Language of Science in Intensifying Environmental Crisis: An Ecolinguistic Perspective

Following on from Chawla (1991) who seeks the root of all environmental crisis in language, the present paper first introduces ecolinguistics as a new area in recent linguistic studies, and then examines the inadequacies of the language of science in reflecting ecological events and phenomena at the two levels of lexis and grammar.For this purpose, a corpus was established containing sample articles in Persian journals concerning ecological issues, and later examined in terms of ecolinguistics. The qualitative and quantitative analyses revealed high frequency of scientific terms and euphemisems at the lexical level and of the passive and conditional structures at the grammatical level. The results also showed that personal pronouns and tense were covertly present in the scientific discourse of the corpus.