Disaster linguistics, climate change semantics and public discourse studies: a semantically-enhanced discourse study of 2011 Queensland Floods

Natural disasters, such as what are known in English ‘floods’ and ‘wildfires’, increasingly a topic of concern due to the climate emergency, their vocabulary public discourses hold much be explored through linguistics. This article inaugurates examination discourse about extreme weather events semantically-enhanced studies, an approach which is based on Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) developed herein. Taking example floods particular geographic, cultural historical environment Australian state Queensland 2011, this transtextual study draws inquiry into event spoken Australia, more broadly, along with media reports, literature from humanities social sciences. Five case studies patterns presented cast semantic spotlights discourses. It demonstrated that can provide high resolution analysis bring out factors at play language thereby contributing disaster linguistics, change semantics studies.