Discourse markers in corporate disclosures on climate change by The Bank of England: A quantitative analysis

Abstract

The issue of climate change is one of the fundamental problems that the humanity faces and needs to overcome (Gjerstad & Fløttum, 2021; Kapranov, 2022). One of the ways of overcoming the negative consequences of climate change is to inform the public at large and other relevant stakeholders of the measures to mitigate it. In this regard, it should be observed that financial institutions and, in particular, The Bank of England, which is considered a leading financial institution worldwide, inform their stakeholders of the measures they undertake in climate change mitigation and/or amelioration. Importantly, however, it is pivotal to examine what financial institutions do in order to mitigate the current climate crisis and how they communicate their climate change-related activities to the stakeholders. In this light, the article presents a quantitative study whose purpose is to identify and quantify the most frequent discourse markers (further – DMs) in corporate disclosures on the issue of climate change published by The Bank of England. To that end, the study employs a quantitative methodology of the frequency analysis afforded by the computer program AntConc (Anthony, 2022). The program is applied to a corpus of The Bank of England’s climate change disclosures published from 2020 to 2024 in order to calculate the frequency of the occurrence of DMs. In addition, the data garnered by AntConc (Anthony, 2022) are processed in Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 20.0 (IMB, 2011) in order to calculate means and standard deviations of the DMs under consideration. The results of the quantitative analysis show that the most frequent DMs in the corpus are and, as, and such. The results are further interpreted in the study through the prism of the approach to DMs formulated by Fraser (2015), who considers the following three types of DMs, namely (І) contrastive, (ІІ) implicative, and (ІІІ) elaborative. Informed by Fraser’s (2015) classification of DMs, the results of the study indicate that the types of elaborative and implicative DMs occur frequently, whilst the occurrence of the contrastive DMs is infrequent in the corpus. These findings are interpreted in the study as a pragmatic strategy of The Bank of England that consists in clarifying, commenting, and specifying climate-change related content, as well as providing indirect information about it rather than communicating climate change-related issues by means of referring to contrastive discursive devices, such as the contrastive DMs (for instance, but, however, yet, etc.). The novelty of the study consists in investigating an under-researched phenomenon of the frequency of DMs in climate change disclosures by The Bank of England. The relevance of the study is as follows. The issue of climate change poses innumerable challenges that are experienced by ordinary people as well as corporate actors (Kapranov, 2022, 2023) and the way The Bank of England reacts to this issue linguistically and discursively, inclusive of the use of DMs, provides an example of how climate change can be addressed by the leading financial institutions. The results of the present study, therefore, can serve as a direction for future research into the best practices of climate change communication by Anglophone corporate and financial actors.