“Shades of green”
Greenness in Sustainability Discourse in British and Italian Media
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13136/2281-4582/2026.i28.1763Keywords:
Green, Sustainability, Metaphor, Metonymy, News discourseAbstract
Within sustainability discourse, green is frequently employed in combination with a wide range of nouns, acting as a versatile signifier of attention to environmental issues (Fuoli and Beelitz 2023; Bevitori 2012). Its literal meaning metonymically grounds it in the physical environment, allowing it to stand in for the natural world, and this mapping underpins the conceptual metaphor GREEN AS GOOD FOR THE PLANET (Augé 2019) or GREEN AS SUSTAINABLE. This study aims to understand how greenness is constructed in sustainability discourse, through the analysis of a comparable corpus of articles in British and Italian newspapers containing the words sustainability/sustainable development and the Italian equivalents. The collocational behaviour of green was examined to uncover patterns of usage, which were further investigated through concordances.
Findings show that metaphorical uses predominate, with collocations relating predominantly to the semantic domains of economy and finance, policy, energy and technology. While both languages also present a number of literal uses for, respectively, green and verde, Italian divides its semantic space by employing the borrowed adjective green with the exclusive function of unambiguously signalling a connection to sustainability. The notion of greenness is in a few cases extended creatively, with the aim of conveying more nuanced understandings of sustainability efforts. Nonetheless, overall lexical patterns suggest that green operates as a floating signifier, similarly to sustainability (Catenaccio 2019), evoking ethicality while simultaneously avoiding engaging concretely with environmental issues.
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