When green rhetoric and cognitive linguistics meet

President G. W. Bush’s environmental discourse in his State of the Union Addresses (2001-2008)

Résumé

This paper pioneers a new field of research as its aim is to apply the cognitive linguistic tools to the analysis of green rhetoric. The corpus data is composed of President G. W. Bush’s eight State of the Union Addresses (SOTUA). Through a statistical analysis, the paper throws light on the importance attached to environmental issues and climate change in comparison with the text dedicated to the War on Terror theme. The paper then champions that Bush’s green rhetoric is based on narrative structures and a process of storytelling (Poletta, 2006) which allow the Bush Administration to strategically frame, in Lakoff’s sense (2004), climate change in order to influence the way the issue is then conceptualized by the American people. The concept of greenwash (Greer and Bruno, 1996) –or how posing as environmentally friendly can be used as a way of promoting another type of a not so eco-friendly reality– is finally called upon to highlight what those actual framing processes wishes to obliterate and why.