AEDEAN 48: Daniel Pascual analyses climate discourse patterns in explainers
Our InterGedi member Dr Daniel Pascual also presented at the 48th edition of the AEDEAN Conference, which was held from November 12th-14th, in Vitoria-Gasteiz. This 2025 Conference was organised by the Department of English Philology, German Philology and Translation and Interpretation at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU).
His paper was titled “Recontextualised knowledge in explainers: Corpus trends and features in the dissemination of climate discourse” and was aimed at investigating three main issues: the degree of authors’ intrusion to recontextualise specialised climate-related knowledge; the register used to meet this end; and potential points of similarity or divergence between domain-specific and generalist websites as regards both aspects.
Have a look at his abstract below:
Recontextualised knowledge in explainers: Corpus trends and features in the dissemination of climate discourse
The ecosystem of digital practices to communicate specialised information is vast and complex. Explainers are but one example of dissemination practices hosted on websites and written by experts, such as journalists and scholars, in specific professional areas. Explainers do not escape the fuzziness in the boundaries and features of digitally-mediated discursive spaces, and manifold labels and formats are chosen to encapsulate them. They may coexist in knowledge dissemination websites with other digital practices, such as feature articles, editorials, press releases and glossaries. This is why analyses of explainers are worth undertaking, so that their use and position within the range of digital scientific dissemination practices can be further understood.
Rooted in professional journalism, explainers assist lay users in rapidly grasping specialised topics without deep previous knowledge (Pascual and Sancho-Ortiz, 2024). Questions posed in effective explainers cannot be answered with a quick Google search (Bahr, 2023). Explainers delve into the context behind the headlines to provide readers with essential and complete background information, enabling a clearer understanding of unfolding events. Discursive processes of recontextualization, which is a key phenomenon in digital dissemination practices (e.g., Lorés, 2024; Mur-Dueñas, 2024), are also intrinsic to explainers, which transform specialised knowledge stemming from journal articles into information for the general public (Zou and Hyland 2023).
The study analyses recontextualization processes in climate explainers to investigate (1) the extent to which authors intrude into the text to disclose specialised knowledge, (2) how register unfolds in explainers about climate discourse, and (3) whether there are differences in the degree of author intrusion and register variation between generalist and domainspecific websites. The corpus compiled for this study is retrieved from the SciDis Database (Pascual and Sancho-Ortiz, 2024), and includes 40 explainers extracted from four different websites: two generalist media outlets (BBC News and The Guardian) and two domainspecific sources (Climate Promise and Carbon Brief). For inclusion in the corpus, explainers in generalist websites had to be classified under the categories ‘Climate’ or ‘Environment’. All explainers selected respond either to wh-questions (what, how, or why) or to ‘yes/no’
questions. These cues were clear in the headlines of explainers as well as in headings structuring the body of the texts.
The analysis is undertaken by using tools from Corpus Linguistics, through the SketchEngine software, both to detect authorial intrusion and register variation at lexicogrammatical, semantic and pragmatic levels. The expression of epistemic authority is investigated through the analysis of first-person pronouns, epistemic verbs, and modal constructions. Register variation is explored through aspects such as technical terminology, passive constructions, sentence length and lexical density. Findings unveil the mapping of discursive phenomena in explainers from generalist and domain-specific websites, and
highlights linguistic mechanisms used to tailor climate communication to lay and expert audiences. The study also reveals different degrees of author intrusion in generalist and domain-specific websites as well as variation in register patterns in one and the other publication type. Implications are raised for experts, who may make informed choices as regards how to circulate information about climate and the environment through explainers.
References
Bahr, Sarah. 2023. “Why We Write Explainers: An Explainer.” The New York Times, June 4, 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/04/insider/why-we-write-explainers-anexplainer.html
Lorés, Rosa. 2024. “Digesting Psychology: Metadiscourse as a Recontextualizing Tool in the Digital Communication of Disciplinary Research.” Chinese Journal of Applied Linguistics 47 (2): 178–195. https://doi.org/10.1515/CJAL-2024-0202.
Mur-Dueñas, Pilar. 2024. “Digital Dissemination Practices: An Analysis of Explanatory Strategies in the Process of Recontextualising Specialised Knowledge.” Discourse & Interaction 17 (1): 94–114. https://doi.org/10.5817/DI2024-1-94.
Pascual, D. and Sancho-Ortiz, A.E. (2024). Investigating recontextualisation processes in scientific digital practices: The SciDis Database. Revista Electrónica de Lingüística Aplicada 23, 101-118. https://doi.org/10.58859/rael.v23i1.649.
Zou, Hao, and Ken Hyland. 2024. “‘Let’s Start with the Basics of the Virus’: Engaging the Public in Two Forms of Explainers.” Journal of English for Academic Purposes 68: 101353. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2024.101353.