Sustainability has dominated the conversation about climate change since the early 2000s. The presence of Sustainable Development Goals strengthened the connection between the two (SDGs) set up by the United Nations General Assembly in 2015, with Goal Number 13 being climate action concerning the ever-worsening climate change. Ever since the word ‘sustainable’ has been heavily circulated in the media, it has been associated with various words from fashion to finance. Utilising the News on the Web (NOW) Corpus, the study explores the representation of the word ‘sustainable’ in media concerning climate change discussion under semantic prosody and semantic preference analysis. Using collocations of the node word, semantic preference determines the semantic set related to the node word, while semantic prosody interprets the environment in which the node word pertains. The collocations are semantically labelled with the help of an automatic semantic tagger UCREL Semantic Analysis System (USAS) to find the semantic preference. At the same time, the concordance lines in NOW Corpus are examined to determine the semantic prosody. The study finds that the word ‘sustainable’ tends to be associated with semantic sets related to the environment, Sustainable Development Goals, social issues and humanity, as well as money. It also indicates that the node word has positive prosody. The representation of the word ‘sustainable’ in the media is seen as favourable, not only as a way of living but also as a way of behaving in many aspects encompassing our lives.

Keywords: collocation; semantic preference; semantic prosody; sustainable; NOW Corpus

Archer, D., A. Wilson, A., & P. Rayson. (2002). Introduction to the USAS category system. Lancaster University. http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/usas/usas_guide.pdf

Baker, P., Hardie, A., & McEnery, T. (2006). A glossary of corpus linguistics. Edinburgh University Press.

Biber, D., & Reppen, R. (Eds.). (2015). The Cambridge handbook of English corpus linguistics. Cambridge University Press.

Bromhead, H. (2021). Disaster linguistics, climate change semantics and public discourse studies: a semantically-enhanced discourse study of 2011 Queensland Floods. Language Sciences, 85, 101381.

Carvalho, A. (2010). Media (ted) discourses and climate change: A focus on political subjectivity and (dis) engagement. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 1(2), 172-179.

Cheng, W. (2011). Exploring corpus linguistics: Language in action. Routledge.

Davies, M. (2016). NOW Corpus (News on the Web). https://www.english-corpora.org/now/

Enh, A.M., & Samak, N. (2020). The roles of newspaper as a communication medium of government to people after the general election in 1969. Jurnal Komunikasi: Malaysian Journal of Communication, 36(1), 1–19.

Enh, A.M., Bustami, M.K., Mustafa, H., Mokhtar, M.S., & Ashri, N.S.M. (2022). The Malaysian palm issue in the European Union Press Report. Jurnal Komunikasi: Malaysian Journal of Communication, 38(1), 118-142.

Fernández-Vázquez, J. S., & Sancho-Rodríguez, Á. (2020). Critical discourse analysis of climate change in IBEX 35 companies. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 157(April), 120063.

Firth, J. (1968). Selected Papers of J. R. Firth 1952–59. (F. Palmer, Ed.). Longmans.

Gann, T., & Matlock, T. (2014). The Semantics of Climate Change and Global Warming. Cognitive Science, 36, 505-510.

Halliday, M., & Hasan, R. (1976). Cohesion in English. Routledge.

Hunston, S. (2002). Corpora in applied linguistics. Cambridge University Press.

Hunston, S., & Laviosa, S. (2000). Corpus linguistics. University of Birmingham.

IPCC. (n.d.). https://www.ipcc.ch/

Kjellmer, G. (1996). Idiomen, kollokationerna och lexikonet. Lexico Nordica, III, 79-90.

Klimova, B. F. (2014). Using corpus linguistics in the development of writing. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 141, 124–128.

Lindquist, H. (2009). Corpus linguistics and the description of English. Edinburgh University Press.

Lindquist, H. (2009). Corpus linguistics and the description of English. Edinburgh University Press.

Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. (n.d). https://www.ldoceonline.com/

Louw, B. (1993). Irony in the text or insincerity in the writer? — The diagnostic potential of semantic prosodies. In M. Baker, G. Francis, & E. Tognini-Bonelli (Eds.), Text and technology: In honour of John Sinclair (pp. 157-176). John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Maslin, M. (2014). Climate change: A very short introduction (3rd ed.). Oxford University Press.

McEnery, T., Xiao, R., & Tono, Y. (2006). Corpus-based language studies: An advanced resource book. Routledge.

McEnery, T., & Hardie, A. (2012). Corpus linguistics: Method, theory and practice. Cambridge University Press.

Partington, A. (1998). Patterns and meanings: Using corpora for English language research and teaching (Vol. II). John Benjamins Publishing.

Partington, A. (2004). "Utterly content in each other's company" Semantic prosody and semantic preference. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, IX(1), 131-156.

Portney, K. (2015). Sustainability. The MIT Press.

Quiñones, L. (2022). Five ways media and journalists can support climate action while tackling misinformation. https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/10/1129162, October 3, 2022.

Raskin, P. B., Gallopín, G., Gutman, P., Hammond, A., Kates, R., & Swart, R. (2002). Great Transition: The promise and lure of the times ahead. Stockholm Environment Institute.

Sinclair, J. (1987). Looking up. Collins.

Sinclair, J. (1991). Corpus, concordance, collocation. Oxford University Press.

Sinclair, J., Jones, S., & Daley, R. (2004). English collocation studies: The OSTI report. Continuum.

Stewart, D. (2010). Semantic prosody: A Critical Evaluation. Routledge.

Stubbs, M. (2001). Words and phrases: Corpus studies of lexical semantics. Wiley.

Stubbs, M. (2002). Two quantitative methods of studying phraseology in English. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, VII(2), 215-244.

Taufek, T. E., Nor, N. F. M., Jaludin, A., Tiun, S., Choy, L. K., & Aziz, J. (2022). Media report about climate change in an English online Malaysian newspaper through thematic and discourse analysis approaches. 3L: Language, Linguistics, Literature, 28(2), 193–210.

Tognini-Bonelli, E. (2001). Corpus Linguistics at work. John Benjamins Publishing Company.

United Nations. (n.d.). What is climate change? https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/what-is-climate-change

Wei, K.K., Hamzah, Z.V.P., & Enh, A.M. 2021. The development of the communication technology and its contributions to the British administration and society in Straits settlements 1902-1938. Jurnal Komunikasi: Malaysian Journal of Communication, 37(1), 107–125.

World Commission on Environment and Development. (1987). Our common future. Oxford University Press.