Language and reconnection with nature: a grammar of enchantment

The aim of this thesis is to identify ways in which language can express and promote enchantment with nature. The notion of enchantment is grounded in Rachel Carson’s (1965) concept of a sense of wonder, understood as a feeling of fascination, absorption in, and profound respect and care for the natural world. The fil rouge of the research is the ecosophy Interconnect!, which foregrounds values of communion, belonging, care, and respect. These values underpin a reconfiguration of dominant anthropocentric narratives, fostering alternative stories to live by that reflect ecocentric understandings of reality. They also inform the ethical orientation of the study. The thesis is structured around three core hypotheses that investigate how contemporary nature writing may evoke enchantment with and within nature through linguistic strategies. The analysis focuses on the narratives and discourses instantiated in a corpus of contemporary non-fiction nature writing comprising 38 books (3,340,828 tokens) published between 2010 and 2024. The study proposes a grammar of enchantment, developed through the systematic collection, categorisation, and interpretation of linguistic data. Here, grammar is understood in a broad sense as a constellation of linguistic features – including lexical choices, grammatical constructions, and rhetorical resources– that convey enchantment and respect for nature to the reader. Situated within the theoretical framework of ecolinguistics, the project adopts a corpus-assisted methodology integrating quantitative and qualitative approaches. Drawing further on Systemic Functional Linguistics and Framing theories it examines how more-than-human agency and interconnection are construed in the corpus. In doing so, the thesis demonstrates the potential of corpus-assisted ecolinguistics to elucidate both the ecological implications of language and the ways in which texts may nurture or undermine ecologically sustainable worldviews.