Facing climate change and climate crisis in language corpora: A comparative study of English, French and Estonian

Abstract

This paper examines how the terms climate change and climate crisis and their French and Estonian equivalents are used in large language corpora, focusing on their collocational patterns, semantic profiles, and implied framings. The analysis focuses on three types of relations: adjectival modifiers, broader lexical co-occurrences, and verbal collocations. The results show that across the three language corpora, the term climate change is predominantly associated with institutional and technocratic contexts and with verbs and nouns referring to structured intervention, while climate crisis is associated with more urgent and affective vocabulary and is more closely linked to activist contexts. Beyond the shared metaphor of fighting the crisis, the data also point to the relevance of the metaphor of time in motion, particularly in climate change discourses.