„Schöne Klimaprosa“, „unnötig dramatische Rhetorik“ und „Blablabla“: Sprachthematisierende Äußerungen und metadiskursive Reflexionen im deutschen Klimawandeldiskurs

The present article examines metalinguistic and metadiscursive reflections in the public discourse on climate change. The public thematisations of language play a crucial role in public discourses as they carry out strategic and action-orienting functions. The article investigates which expressions and whose language use are repeatedly the subject of metalinguistic reflections in the defined section of the discourse. In the process we also address the question of which positions and arguments are expressed or justified through the thematisation of language. Furthermore, the study investigates the metadiscursive reflections of the discourse participants, which are frequently connected with media criticism. The analysis focuses on a corpus of manually selected articles from German newspapers. In order to identify and examine the explicit thematisations of language, the paper adopts a methodological approach which combines corpus-linguistic tools with interpretive-hermeneutic analyses. The analysis reveals how the critical thematisation of the same linguistic phenomenon is in many cases used to justify conflicting positions in the discourse.