Cover not available

Article published In: Register and social media
Edited by Isobelle Clarke and Jack Grieve
[Register Studies 4:2] 2022
► pp. 232–262

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
EPUB logo with download linkDownload EPUB
authorization required

Epistemic stance in the climate change debate

A comparison of proponents and sceptics on Twitter and Reddit

ORCiD logo with link | University of Helsinki
Published online: 27 October 2022
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/rs.22005.bir
Abstract
This study analyses epistemic stance in social media climate change discussions, contributing to our understanding of how factuality and likelihood are evaluated in climate change discourse. Using a corpus of 1.2 million words, the paper compares the frequencies of epistemic stance in climate change sceptic and climate change proponent discourses on two social media platforms, Twitter and Reddit. Based on the quantitative analysis, the paper argues that both platform and climate change beliefs influence register in terms of epistemic stance. Overall, Reddit uses more epistemic stance markers than Twitter. Sceptics use less hedging of likelihood and more lexis evaluating the factuality and reliability of their opponents. The interpersonal functions of epistemic stance are shown to be associated with different platform uses and affordances and with the different goals, worldviews, and concerns of the factions. The study thus calls for further linguistic comparison of platforms and different factions within the platforms.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Climate change discourse
    • 2.2Epistemic stance and register
  • 3.Materials and methods
    • 3.1Data collection
    • 3.2Methods
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Evaluation of likelihood
    • 4.2Evaluation of (non)veracity
    • 4.3Pejorative evaluation of nonveracity
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (84)
References
Agius, C., Bergman Rosamond, A., & Kinnvall, C. (2020). Populism, ontological insecurity and gendered nationalism: Masculinity, climate denial and Covid-19. Politics, Religion and Ideology, 21 (4), 432–450. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Alonso-Almeida, F. (2015). On the mitigating function of modality and evidentiality. Evidence from English and Spanish medical research papers. Intercultural Pragmatics, 12 (1), 33–57. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Anderson, A. A., & Huntington, H. E. (2017). Social media, science, and attack discourse: How Twitter discussions of climate change use sarcasm and incivility. Science Communication, 39 (5), 598–620. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Andersson, M. (2021). The climate of climate change: Impoliteness as a hallmark of homophily in YouTube comment threads on Greta Thunberg’s environmental activism. Journal of Pragmatics, 1781, 93–107. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Andi, S. (2020). How people access news about climate change. In Newman, N., Fletcher, R., Schulz, A., Andı, S., Nielsen, R. K. (Eds.), Reuters Institute digital news report 2020 (pp. 52–57). Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Arlt, D., Hoppe, I., Schmitt, J. B., De Silva-Schmidt, F., & Brüggemann, M. (2018). Climate engagement in a digital age: Exploring the drivers of participation in climate discourse online in the context of COP21. Environmental Communication, 12 (1), 84–98. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Baumgartner, J., Zannettou, S., Keegan, B., Squire, M., & Blackburn, J. (2020). The Pushshift Reddit dataset. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 14 (1), 830–839. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bednarek, M. (2006). Evaluation in media discourse: analysis of a newspaper corpus. London: Continuum.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2008). Emotion talk across corpora. Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bednarek, M., Ross, A. S., Boichak, O., Doran, Y. J., Carr, G., Altmann, E. G., & Alexander, T. J. (2022). Winning the discursive struggle? The impact of a significant environmental crisis event on dominant climate discourses on Twitter. Discourse, Context & Media, 451, 100564. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Benjamini, Y., & Hochberg, Y. (1995). Controlling the false discovery rate: A practical and powerful approach to multiple testing. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series B (Methodological), 57 (1), 289–300.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Biber, D., & Conrad, S. (2019). Register, genre, and style (2nd ed). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Biber, D., & Egbert, J. (2018). Register variation online. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Biber, D., & Finegan, E. (1988). Adverbial stance types in English. Discourse Processes, 11 (1), 1–34. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E. (1999). Longman grammar of spoken and written English. London: Longman.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Boye, K. (2012). Epistemic meaning: A crosslinguistic and functional-cognitive study. Berlin: De Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Brüggemann, M., Elgesem, D., Bienzeisler, N., Gertz, H. D., & Walter, S. (2020). Mutual group polarization in the blogosphere: Tracking the hoax discourse on climate change. International Journal of Communication, 141, 1025–1048.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Buckledee, S. (2018). The language of Brexit: How Britain talked its way out of the European Union. London: Bloomsbury Academic.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cagle, L. E., & Herndl, C. (2019). Shades of denialism: Discovering possibilities for a more nuanced deliberation about climate change in online discussion forums. Communication Design Quarterly, 7 (1), 22–39. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Charles, M. (2003). “This mystery…”: A corpus-based study of the use of nouns to construct stance in theses from two contrasting disciplines. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 2 (4), 313–326. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chipidza, W. (2021). The effect of toxicity on COVID-19 news network formation in political subcommunities on Reddit: An affiliation network approach. International Journal of Information Management, 611. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Clarke, I. (2022). A multi-dimensional analysis of English tweets. Language and Literature, 31 (2), 124–149. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Conrad, S., & Biber, D. (2000). Adverbial marking of stance in speech and writing. In Hunston, S., Thompson, G. (Eds.), Evaluation in text: Authorial stance and the construction of discourse (pp. 56–73). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Culpeper, J. (2011). Impoliteness: Using language to cause offence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
De Francisci Morales, G., Monti, C., & Starnini, M. (2021). No echo in the chambers of political interactions on Reddit. Scientific Reports, 11 (1), 2818. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Del Valle, M. E., Sijtsma, R., Stegeman, H., & Borge, R. (2020). Online deliberation and the public sphere: Developing a coding manual to assess deliberation in Twitter political networks. Javnost – The Public, 27 (3), 211–229. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Du Bois, J. W. (2007). The stance triangle. In Englebretson, R. (Ed.), Stancetaking in discourse (pp. 139–182). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dunlap, R. E., & McCright, A. M. (2010). Climate change denial: Sources, actors and strategies. In Lever-Tracy, C. (Ed.), Routledge handbook of climate change and society (pp. 240–259). Milton Park: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Eberl, M. (2020). Double trouble: Are 280-character tweets comparable to 140-character tweets? In Rüdiger, S., Dayter, D. (Eds.), Corpus approaches to social media (pp. 131–146). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Englebretson, R. (2007). Stancetaking in discourse: an introduction. In Englebretson, R. (Ed.), Stancetaking in discourse (pp. 1–26). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Friginal, E., Waugh, O., & Titak, A. (2017). Linguistic variation in Facebook and Twitter posts. In Friginal, E. (Ed.), Studies in corpus-based sociolinguistics (pp. 342–362). New York: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gablasova, D., Brezina, V., McEnery, T., & Boyd, E. (2017). Epistemic stance in spoken L2 English: The effect of task and speaker style. Applied Linguistics, 38 (5), 613–637. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
González, M., Roseano, P., Borràs-Comes, J., & Prieto, P. (2017). Epistemic and evidential marking in discourse: Effects of register and debatability. Lingua, 186–1871, 68–87. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gray, B., & Biber, D. (2012). Current conceptions of stance. In Hyland, K., Guinda, C. S. (Eds.), Stance and voice in written academic genres (pp. 15–33). London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gries, S. T. (2008). Dispersions and adjusted frequencies in corpora. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 13 (4), 403–437. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2020). Analysing dispersion. In Paquot, M., Gries, S. T. (Eds.), Practical handbook of corpus linguistics (pp. 99–118). Berlin: Springer International. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Grundmann, R., & Krishnamurthy, R. (2010). The discourse of climate change: A corpus-based approach. Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines, 4 (2), 113–133.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hansson, S. (2018). The discursive micro-politics of blame avoidance: Unpacking the language of government blame games. Policy Sciences, 51 (4), 545–564. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hobson, K., & Niemeyer, S. (2013). “What sceptics believe”: The effects of information and deliberation on climate change scepticism. Public Understanding of Science, 22 (4), 396–412. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Honnibal, M., & Johnson, M. (2015). An improved non-monotonic transition system for dependency parsing. In Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (pp. 1373–1378). Lisbon: Association for Computational Linguistics. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hosch-Dayican, B. (2014). Online political activities as emerging forms of political participation: How do they fit in the conceptual map? Acta Politica, 49 (3), 342–346.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hyland, K. (1996). Writing without conviction? Hedging in science research articles. Applied Linguistics, 17 (4), 433–454. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(1998). Boosting, hedging and the negotiation of academic knowledge. Text, 18 (3), 349–382.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2005). Metadiscourse: exploring interaction in writing. London: Continuum.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jacobs, K., & Spierings, N. (2019). A populist paradise? Examining populists’ Twitter adoption and use. Information, Communication & Society, 22 (12), 1681–1696. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jacques, P. J., & Knox, C. C. (2016). Hurricanes and hegemony: A qualitative analysis of micro-level climate change denial discourses. Environmental Politics, 831–852. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jaffe, A. (2009). Introduction. In Jaffe, A. (Ed.), Stance: Sociolinguistic perspectives (pp. 3–28). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jaidka, K., Zhou, A., & Lelkes, Y. (2019). Brevity is the soul of Twitter: The constraint affordance and political discussion. Journal of Communication, 69 (4), 345–372. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jang, S. M., & Hart, P. S. (2015). Polarized frames on “climate change” and “global warming” across countries and states: Evidence from Twitter big data. Global Environmental Change, 321, 11–17. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jiang, F., & Hyland, K. (2015). ‘The fact that’: Stance nouns in disciplinary writing. Discourse Studies, 17 (5), 529–550. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Knight, G., & Greenberg, J. (2011). Talk of the enemy: Adversarial framing and climate change discourse. Social Movement Studies, 10 (4), 323–340. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Knoblock, N. (2020). Negotiating dominance on Facebook : Positioning of self and others in pro- and anti-Trump comments on immigration. Discourse & Society, 31 (5), 520–539. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kovaka, K. (2021). Climate change denial and beliefs about science. Synthese, 198 (3), 2355–2374. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Leombruni, L. V. (2015). How you talk about climate change matters: A communication network perspective on epistemic skepticism and belief strength. Global Environmental Change, 351, 148–161. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Leuckert, S., & Leuckert, M. (2020). Towards a digital sociolinguistics: Communities of practice on Reddit. In Rüdiger, S., Dayter, D. (Eds.), Corpus approaches to social media (pp. 15–40). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Liimatta, A. (2019). Exploring register variation on Reddit. Register Studies, 1 (2), 269–295. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lijffijt, J., Nevalainen, T., Säily, T., Papapetrou, P., Puolamäki, K., & Mannila, H. (2016). Significance testing of word frequencies in corpora. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 31 (2), 374–397. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Massanari, A. (2017). #Gamergate and The Fappening: How Reddit’s algorithm, governance, and culture support toxic technocultures. New Media & Society, 19 (3), 329–346. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Medimorec, S., & Pennycook, G. (2015). The language of denial: text analysis reveals differences in language use between climate change proponents and skeptics. Climatic Change, 133 (4), 597–605. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Moore, C., & Chuang, L. (2017). Redditors revealed: Motivational factors of the Reddit community. In Proceedings of the 50th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (pp. 2313–2322). Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Myers, G. (1989). The pragmatics of politeness in scientific articles. Applied Linguistics, 10 (1), 1–35. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Myers, K. F., Doran, P. T., Cook, J., Kotcher, J. E., & Myers, T. A. (2021). Consensus revisited: quantifying scientific agreement on climate change and climate expertise among Earth scientists 10 years later. Environmental Research Letters, 16 (10). Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Newman, N., Fletcher, R., Robertson, C. T., Eddy, K., & Nielsen, R. K. (2022). Reuters Institute digital news report 2022. Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Oz, M., Zheng, P., & Chen, G. M. (2018). Twitter versus Facebook: Comparing incivility, impoliteness, and deliberative attributes. New Media & Society, 20 (9), 3400–3419. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Paradis, C. (2001). Adjectives and boundedness. Cognitive Linguistics, 12 (1), 47–65. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Poortinga, W., Whitmarsh, L., Steg, L., Böhm, G., & Fisher, S. (2019). Climate change perceptions and their individual-level determinants: A cross-European analysis. Global Environmental Change, 551, 25–35. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
r/ClimateChange (n.d.). ClimateChange, Reddit, [URL]. Internet archived version 16.10.2019. [URL]. Accessed 2.8.2022
r/ClimateSkeptics (n.d.). ClimateSkeptics, Reddit, [URL]. Internet archived version 15.10.2019. [URL] Accessed 2.8.2022
R Core Team (2019). R: A language and environment for statistical computing [WWW Document]. [URL]
Rayson, P., Archer, D., Piao, S. L., & McEnery, T. (2004). The UCREL semantic analysis system. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Beyond Named Entity Recognition Semantic Labelling for NLP Tasks in Association with 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2004), 25th May 2004, Lisbon, Portugal (pp. 7–12). Lisbon, Portugal.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Robards, B. (2018). Belonging and neo-tribalism on social media site Reddit. In Hardy, A., Bennett, A., Robards, B. (Eds.), Neo-tribes: Consumption, leisure and tourism (pp. 187–206). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schmid, H.-J. (2000). English abstract nouns as conceptual shells: From corpus to cognition. Berlin: De Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Swales, J. M. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Titak, A., & Roberson, A. (2013). Dimensions of web registers: an exploratory multi-dimensional comparison. Corpora, 8 (2), 235–260. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tranter, B., & Booth, K. (2015). Scepticism in a changing climate: A cross-national study. Global Environmental Change, 331, 154–164. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Twint project (2021). TWINT – Twitter Intelligence Tool [Github repository], [URL]. Accessed 2.8.2022.
Vassileva, I. (2001). Commitment and detachment in English and Bulgarian academic writing. English for Specific Purposes, 20 (1), 83–102. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Vulpe, S. (2020). Cooling down the future. A discourse analysis of climate change skepticism. The Social Science Journal, 1–17. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wiemer, B. (2018). Evidentials and epistemic modality. In Aikhenvald, A. Y. (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of evidentiality (pp. 84–108). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Williams, H. T. P., McMurray, J. R., Kurz, T., & Lambert, F. H. (2015). Network analysis reveals open forums and echo chambers in social media discussions of climate change. Global Environmental Change, 321, 126–138. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
World Meteorological Organization (2022). State of the Global Climate 2021 (WMO-No. 1290). Geneva: World Meteorological Organization.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Zappavigna, M. (2014). CoffeeTweets: bonding around the bean on Twitter. In Seargeant, P., Tagg, C. (Eds.), The language of social media (pp. 139–160). London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Zappavigna, M., & Martin, J. R. (2018). #Communing affiliation: Social tagging as a resource for aligning around values in social media. Discourse, Context & Media, 221, 4–12. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (3)

Cited by three other publications

Messerli, Thomas C, Daria Dayter, Sven Leuckert, Aatu Liimatta, Hanna Mahler, Axel Bohmann, Gustavo Kozma & Rafaela Tosin
2025. Digital debating cultures: communicative practices on Reddit. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 40:1 ► pp. 227 ff. DOI logo
Visonà, Mark Winston & Şebnem Kurt
2025. A corpus-assisted discourse analysis of epistemic stances in tweets about U.S. police from 2013 to 2023. Applied Corpus Linguistics 5:3 ► pp. 100138 ff. DOI logo
Biri, Ylva
2024. Personal conviction against general knowledge. In Self- and Other-Reference in Social Contexts [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 342], ► pp. 14 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 30 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue