ABSTRACT Discourse analysis has been widely applied to the study of environmental communication, highlighting how language is used to reflect and affect our attitudes towards the natural world. The potential of discourse analysis to ‘reveal’ the values that people attribute to nature has recently been recognized in the context of environmental debates. This paper takes a new cross-disciplinary approach to the analysis of evaluation, combining a discourse approach and insights from environmental philosophy and environmental policy to address the following main (...) questions: Which values of nature may be embedded in discourse about nature? To what extent are these values represented in people’s narratives about trees and woodland in the U.K.? What are the implications of the findings for the critical analysis of evaluative discourse? What are the implications of the findings for environmental organizations? The analysis is applied to a sample of 514 woodland narratives collected by the U.K. charitable environmental organization Woodland Trust in 2016. The study highlights new critical perspectives that may be gained from the analysis of evaluative discourse and the importance of considering and fostering people’s affective relationship with the natural world in building a strong basis for environmental action. (shrink)

The critical linguistic analysis of authorial stance in English news reporting has long been concerned with uncovering the ideological bias embedded in the seemingly objective and neutral representation of people and events. Interest has recently shifted towards the nature of the authorial voice itself and the extent to which this semblance of objectivity is also typical in non-English reporting. This article explores to what extent the most impersonal ‘reporter voice’, as identified by Martin and White in English hard-news reported in (...) the press, is present in Italian reporting. The ‘appraisal’ categories developed by Martin and White are used, discussed and adapted for this purpose. Attention is thereby also given to significant expressive resources that may not be retrievable from English material alone. Similarities and differences in reporting styles are discussed and reference is made to the social and cultural variables that may underlie them. (shrink)