Green Economy and Green Grammar: an ecolinguistic analysis of the power of language in the discourse on sustainable development.

4 INTRODUCTION This work presents a multidisciplinary approach to the study of contemporary environmental problems, which are investigated at first from a scientific perspective, and, then, taking into account economic and, to a larger extent, linguistic considerations, too. The work is divided into two parts: the first part mainly focuses on the definition of the environmental issue and on the way it started to be dealt with at international level by institutions. The second part, instead, is an in- depth investigation of the recent discipline of ecolinguistics as a means for approaching the study of languages and language uses in an innovative and critical way. What clearly emerges from this analysis is that language has a paramount importance in the construction of the discourse about environment and, consequently, it deeply influences collective sensibility towards environment and ecological problems. The point of departure of Chapter 1 is the reconstruction of the environmental issue and of its most evident effect, climate change, for which scientists are warning about the immediate need of an inversion of trend. At this point, the recent Accord on climate reached in Copenhagen at the end of last year is proposed, together with the analysis of the translation strategies I opted for in Italian, to assess the actual binding force of this Accord for the Member States that approved it.