Public Lecture: Charlotte Taylor

Abstract 

According to the UK government ‘England faces a 5 billion litre public water shortage by 2055 without urgent action’ (Environment Agency 2025) and, globally, the UN predicts that 'roughly half of the world’s population is experiencing severe water scarcity for at least part of the year. These numbers are expected to increase, exacerbated by climate change and population growth’. Furthermore, they note that just ‘0.5 per cent of water on Earth is useable and available freshwater – and climate change is dangerously affecting that supply’. The changing availability of water constitutes a major societal and environmental challenge. And one for which we may hypothesise it is likely that different actors are already responding and discursively paving the way for future action. In some cases, this is explicit, as when the investment press frames water as a commodity. For instance, ‘Like gold and oil, water is a commodity—and it happens to be rather scarce nowadays [...] as with any other scarcity, the water shortage creates investment opportunities’ (Investopedia 2025). Whether a water-scarcity crisis is a threat or opportunity is a question of perspective, and so of framing.

In this paper, I interrogate the ways in which language constructs environmental transformation across different genres by mapping out the way an essential resource – water – is conceptualized across four domains. These are 1) UK parliamentary debates, 2) Ofwat (the water sector regulator up to 2025), 3) English water companies (who, in the privatised context of England and Wales, must communicate with both customers and investors), 4) the financial press (Financial Times, Investor Weekly, Money Week, Investors Chronicle). These corpora are analysed using the tools of corpus and discourse studies to identify a) what aspects of water are made salient b) how water is metaphorically conceptualised and represented c) who is made responsible for actions on water. The aim is to show how these differentiated and specialised forms of communication conceptualise a common target – and to reflect on what the implications are for their audiences.

Bio

Charlotte Taylor is Professor of Discourse and Persuasion at the University of Sussex (UK). Her research centres on the analysis of language as used for evaluative/persuasive purposes. Within this broad area, her research falls into two main sub-categories: the analysis of linguistic representations, and the analysis of linguistic interactions. In doing so, she combines research methods of corpus linguistics with (critical) discourse studies and pragmatics.