Evaluating Climate Commitment and Environmental Sustainability in Corporate Environmental Discourse
An Appraisal Analysis of Affect
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13136/2281-4582/2026.i28.1761Parole chiave:
Environmental sustainability, Climate commitment, Corporate discourse, Emotions, Appraisal FrameworkAbstract
Climate commitment and environmental sustainability have emerged as critical issues for corporations, leading to increased corporate communication showcasing efforts and strategies to achieve environmental goals. In this context, emotions are vital for fostering pro-environmental behaviours (Brosch 2021).
Corporations have been described as emotional arenas in which emotions are “deeply woven into the way power is exercised, trust is held, commitment formed, and decisions made” (Fineman 2000, 2). However, the role of emotions is often underestimated in corporate discourse (Wright and Nyberg 2015).
The present article investigates the use of evaluative language in climate-related corporate discourse, with a particular focus on the role of emotions in evaluative climate commitment and environmental sustainability. To this end, the study analyses a small specialised corpus (85,475 words) of corporate texts, which was manually annotated using the UAM Corpus Tool. The study employs the appraisal framework to scrutinise the use of attitudinal resources in the CRClim annotated corpus, by looking at the affect sub-system (Benítez-Castro and Hidalgo-Tenorio 2019; Martin and White 2005).
Findings shed light on the evaluative patterns corporations employ to articulate their commitment to climate change and environmental sustainability in response to the phenomenon’s impact on corporate productivity. Therefore, the exploration of the emotional dimension within corporate discourse seeks to shed new light on the persuasive mechanisms of corporate communication regarding climate commitment and environmental sustainability.
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