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Title: Discourse markers in Keir Starmer’s speeches on climate change.

 

Vol. 13(1), 2025, pp. 8-26.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.46687/CUPP2991.

 

Author: Oleksandr Kapranov

About the author: Dr Oleksandr Kapranov is an associate professor in English linguistics at NLA University College (Norway). Having obtained his PhD from The University of Western Australia in Perth (WA), he taught English linguistics at a number of universities in Sweden and Norway. His was a post-doctoral fellow at The University of Bergen (Norway), where he conducted research on climate change discourse. His current interests involve academic discourse, academic writing, climate change discourse, cognitive linguistics, and psycholinguistics.

E-mail: oleksandr.kapranov@nla.no                     

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9056-3311

 

Link: http://silc.fhn-shu.com/issues/2025-1/SILC_2025_Vol_13_Issue_1_008-026_19.pdf  

 

Citation (APA style): Kapranov, O. (2025). Discourse markers in Keir Starmer’s speeches on climate change. Studies in Linguistics, Culture, and FLT, 13(1), 8-26. https://doi.org/10.46687/CUPP2991.

 

Abstract: Given that the United Kingdom (the UK) is seen as a world leader in addressing, mitigating, and prioritising the issue of climate change (Albanese et al., 2025), climate change appears to be a frequent theme in British political discourse.  In particular, all major political actors on the UK, inclusive of the Conservative and Labour Parties, have their own agendas associated with the issue of climate change.  Currently, however, there are no published studies on climate change discourse by Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour Party and the incumbent British prime minister. In this light, the article presents a quantitative study whose purpose is to identify, quantify, and discuss discourse markers (henceforth – DMs) in a corpus of speeches on climate change by Keir Starmer. The corpus is analysed in the computer program AntConc (Anthony, 2022) in order to compute the frequency of the occurrence of DMs. The results of the quantitative corpus analysis indicate that the most frequent DMs in the corpus are (i) and, (ii) as, (iii) but, (iv) also, (v) so, and (vi) because. The findings are further discussed and illustrated in the article.

Key words: climate change discourse, computer-assisted study, discourse markers (DMs), Keir Starmer, political speeches on climate change

 

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