“We safeguard biodiversity” : A Qualitative Analysis of three Corporations’ language use regarding nature in their Annual Reports’ Sustainability sections

Abstract

This thesis aims to study the language used in the three large Finnish Forest & Pulp Industry corporations’ year 2022 annual report’s when discussing nature in the sustainability sections. The purpose is to analyse the language from a critical ecolinguistic point of view focusing on how language is used when discussing nature and what this implies about how the corporations’ view nature and how the relationship between them and nature is constructed. This is done utilising Critical Discourse Studies with an Ecolinguistic point of view, together with Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar’s Transitivity Analysis. The results show that language use perpetuates the view on nature as a resource to exploit. This is shown through the constructions of the clauses and superficial discussion on nature, the corporations’ impacts on nature and use of certain words to frame the corporation as sustainable, without further exploring the issues. The results indicate that when it comes to discussing sustainability and nature, there are many ways in which language use still furthers the idea of nature as a resource to exploit, even when seemingly the discussion is eco-friendly and nature positive. A more critical stance on the ability of corporations to obscure their impacts and exploitation of nature is needed.