The talk presents some of the ongoing results of a two-year SNSF-funded Postdoc.Mobility research project conducted by Daria Evangelista and titled The Awareness-Raising Discourse about the Climate Crisis. An Analysis of Written Texts in Italian at the Interplay between Rhetoric, Argumentation Theory and Text Linguistics (n. 230661, 2025-2026).

The presented study (Evangelista/Andone 2027) explores how argumentation employed in public discourse has the potential to raise awareness. Climate crisis communication offers a particularly revealing field to explore this function of argumentation, as it frequently seeks not only to defend claims, but also to make audiences aware of environmental risks, their implications, and the urgency of intervention.

The study has a twofold aim. First, following a functional approach to argumentation (cf. van Eemeren/Grootendorst 1984: 7), we conceptualise and explain awareness-raising as a distinct function of argumentation and identify and explain its constituent subfunctions of informing the audience and prompting action on the part of the addressees. Second, with a linguistic approach to argumentation (cf. Van Eemeren/Houtlosser/Snoeck Henkemans 2007), we investigate the linguistic realization of the awareness-raising function in public climate crisis discourse on a corpus of Italian-language climate crisis texts drawn from institutional websites, environmental campaigns, and online newspapers from Italy and Switzerland (ClimIta, Evangelista 2026).

The research shows that awareness-raising argumentation is realised through four means: knowledge dissemination, questioning established opinions or political decisions, suggesting decision-making, and guiding behaviour through best practices. These four means have different textual and linguistic realisations. Their observation suggests that, instead of leveraging on manipulation or resulting in polarisation, argumentation aimed at awareness-raising could be a viable option in order to create an action-oriented common ground in public discourse without depleting it of its critical reflections.

References

Evangelista, D. (2026). ClimIta: a Corpus of Media and Institutional Written Communication in Italian on the Climate Crisis. Zenodo.

Evangelista, Daria/Andone, Corina (2027, forthcoming), “Arguing to raise awareness. A text-linguistic account of climate crisis discourse”, in: Evangelista, Daria/Andone, Corina (eds) (2027, forthcoming), Argumentative, Rhetorical and Linguistic Dimensions of Climate Crisis Communication, Special issue of the journal Language & Communication, Elsevier.

van Eemeren, F. H. / Grootendorst, R. (1984), Speech acts in argumentative discussions: A theoretical model for the analysis of discussions directed towards solving conflicts of opinion, De Gruyter

van Eemeren, F. H. / Houtlosser, P. / Snoeck Henkemans, A. F. (2007). Argumentative Indicators in Discourse. A Pragma-Dialectical Study. Springer.