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7 - Language, Discourse and Ecosomatic Awareness

from Part II - Language Awareness in Business and the Professions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2022

By
Arran Stibbe
Edited by
Erika Darics
Erika Darics
Affiliation:
Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, The Netherlands
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Summary

This chapter explores the ways that language constructs our view of our bodies and the relationship between our bodies and the environment around us. It considers whether we ‘have a body’ or ‘are a body’, whether we live ‘in the world’ or ‘on earth’, and how shifts in perspective might influence not only our thoughts but also our behaviour. The chapter explores how everyday texts from weather forecasts to Men’s Health magazine construct the body and its relationship to the environment. As well as promoting critical awareness of the linguistic construction of the body and environment in popular culture, the chapter also promotes direct personal exploration of the experience of being a body in the world. This experience can stretch to empathy with other people and other animals who all equally have an existence as moving bodies intrinsically linked with and part of the wider physical environment. Finally, the chapter explores the physical environment as a text – one which has been constructed not with words but with buildings, concrete, tree planting, crop growing etc.

Keywords

ecolinguisticsembodimentsomaticsecosomaticscritical language awareness
Type
Chapter
Information
Language Awareness in Business and the Professions , pp. 118 - 136
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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