Many ecolinguistic studies suggest that textual features such as nominalisations can remove agency from key actors. Texts which employ such phrasings are suggested to repudiate human responsibility for environmental destruction. However, there is a lack of experimental evidence for this proposed effect. Another unknown is the extent to which language proficiency influences any effect. This study takes a comparative approach in which native English speaker and non-native English speaker participants compared two texts on environmental destruction, one written in a typical academic style and the other drawing on ecolinguistic insights. Participants made a series of value judgements based on the texts, with the main aim being to determine whether phrasing affected the degree to which participants thought that humans were held responsible for the environmental destruction described in the text. Overall, regardless of the language proficiency and educational background of the participants, the “ecolinguistically” styled text which “de-nominalised” verbs with human subject pronouns and used “human” as a noun modifier made participants feel as though humans affect the environment more than the traditionally “academic” style text. This finding that phrasing can affect the “construal” of responsibility has implications for the study of ecolinguistics and also for environmental communication more broadly.
Drury et al. (Wed,) studied this question.