Carbon reduction activism in the UK: lexical creativity and lexical framing in the context of climate change

This article examines discourses associated with a new environmental movement, “Carbon Rationing Action Groups” (CRAGs). This case study is intended to contribute to a wider investigation of the emergence of a new type of language used to debate climate change mitigation. Advice on how to reduce one's “carbon footprint,” for example, is provided almost daily. Much of this advice is framed by the use of metaphors and “carbon compounds”—lexical combinations of at least two roots—such as “carbon finance” or “low carbon diet.” The study uses a combination of tools from frame analysis and lexical pragmatics within the general framework of ecolinguistics to compare and contrast language use on the CRAGs' website with press coverage reporting on them. The analysis shows how the use of such lexical carbon compounds enables and facilitates different types of metaphorical frames such as dieting, finance and tax paying, war time rationing, and religious imperatives in the two corpora

Evaluating the impact of ageing population on labour market

Purpose – ageing population causes a number of economic and social problems related to changes in the labour market. This study aims to evaluate the effect of the ageing population on the labour force which is the main indicator of the labour market in EU member states. Research methodology – in order to achieve the aim of the study we applied the following methods: i) trend analysis to estimate and present population and changes of labour force over period, and ii) decomposition method to examine the effects of population and labour force structure in terms of age changes on size of labour force. Findings – over the 2003–2017 period volume of the labour force has declined in Romania, Lithuania, Portugal, Latvia and Greece. This negative effect is influenced by both depopulation and structural changes in the workforce, including population ageing. Size of the labour force has increased in 23 countries, but in 11 of them, these positive changes were influenced by the rising of population activity, while depopulation it influenced negatively. Research limitations – research results support the theoretical approach that ageing population may negatively affect the labour market but do not provide ways to solve this problem and this is the implication for further research. Practical implications – the obtained results are useful for policymakers of the labour market (including pension reforms). Originality/Value – the study contributes to scientific literature by sufficient understanding of ageing population problems that occur in labour market and fills the gap in research of ageing population impact on the labour market, using data of EU member states