Nerlich, Brigitte and Koteyko, Nelya (2009) Carbon reduction activism in the UK: lexical creativity and lexical framing in the context of climate change. Environmental Communication, 3 (2). A note on versions: The version presented here may differ from the published version or from the version of record. If you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher's version. Please see the repository url above for details on accessing the published version and note that access may

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... ire a subscription. For more information, please contact eprints@nottingham.ac.uk Carbon reduction activism in the UK: Lexical creativity and lexical framing in the context of climate change Brigitte Nerlich and Nelya Koteyko This article examines discourses associated with a new environmental movement, 'Carbon Rationing Action Groups' (CRAGs). This case study is intended to contribute to a wider investigation of the emergence of a new type of language used to debate climate change mitigation. Advice on how to reduce one's 'carbon footprint', for example, is provided almost daily. Much of this advice is framed by the use of metaphors and 'carbon compounds' -lexical combinations of at least two roots -such as 'carbon finance' or 'low carbon diet'. The study uses a combination of tools from frame analysis and lexical pragmatics within the general framework of ecolinguistics to compare and contrast language use on the CRAGs' website with press coverage reporting on them. The analysis shows how the use of such lexical carbon compounds enables and facilitates different types of metaphorical frames such as dieting, finance and tax paying, war time rationing and religious imperatives in the two corpora.