Narratives of Sustainability: Interdisciplinary Insights and Ecolinguistic Perspectives

The special issue "Narratives of Sustainability: Interdisciplinary Insights and Ecolinguistic Perspectives" brings together contributions drawing on corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, ecolinguistics, metaphor analysis and appraisal theory to investigate sustainability across official news coverage, corporate reporting, specialised discourse, British and Italian newspapers, and expert-authored public communication. The authors explore the semantic flexibility of sustainability, metaphorical constructions of greenness, emotional and evaluative resources, corporate narrative identities, and changes in sustainability discourse over time. Particular attention is given to how sustainability narratives support institutional and corporate legitimacy and negotiate relationships between ecological concerns, economic priorities, development and growth. Together, the contributions offer a multifaceted account of how sustainability is represented and reinterpreted across communicative contexts, demonstrating the value of qualitative and quantitative approaches to understanding its linguistic and discursive construction.