‘Small is Beautiful’ in English Mass Media Texts on Sustainable Development Nataliia Goshylyk This article analyses the conceptual metaphors of quality, quantity and direction in sustainable development discourse. The research applies the Ecolinguistic paradigm, focusing on the interrelations between language and environment and emphasizing their interdependence. These conceptual metaphors not only frame and are framed by the discourse, but are also discoursegenerating entities. The topic of growthism, which is entrenched in the conceptual metaphors in focus, has so far been analysed only from the lexical point of view, and the dynamic character of the conceptual metaphors which activate the growth frames has not yet been considered. My research looks at ―big and small‖ from an interdisciplinary perspective with the linguistic foundation being the priority. It argues in favour of the coexistence of controversial notions in sustainable development discourse. This type of discourse, which is sometimes rather confusing and requires both definition and content clarification, is based on the combination of natural surroundings and socioeconomic issues. It addresses the conflicting topics of environment and development and is shaped by the controversial conceptual metaphors which are the focus of my research. 1. Introduction The life of a modern human being is challenged by the constant appearance of new notions, terms and phenomena dealing with environmental, social and economic hazards. These threats and the awareness of them have caused the shift from anthropocentrism to a paradigm which takes into account all the players of the field with their reciprocal interaction and may be labelled as ecological/ ecosophical/ ecosystemic etc. The progress within this framework is evident in sustainable development dis- AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 42 (2017) · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Nataliia Goshylyk 142 course, which is the consequence of the growing awareness of the global links between mounting environmental problems, socio-economic issues and promoting peaceful and healthy societies without poverty and inequality. Monitoring this progress using both qualitative and quantitative approaches is hampered by the ambiguity of the term ‗sustainable development‘, which is defined by Hopwood et al. (2005: 38) as ―concentrating on sustainable livelihoods and well-being rather than well-having, and long term environmental sustainability, which requires a strong basis in principles that link the social and environmental to human equity‖. However, the term is frequently used with almost the opposite meaning, viz. leading to growth. The key concepts framing this type of discourse, and their perception in the consciousness of contemporary society, will be revealed and studied in this article. One of these concepts is the concept of growth. Thus, the aim of this research is to present the interrelations of the notions of quantity, quality and direction in the contemporary sustainable development discourse with examples from English mass media texts and to answer the question of their conceptual representation. 2. Ecolinguistics as a fundamental contemporary paradigm The 21 st century poses new challenges in all spheres of existence, linguistics being no exception. One of the major tasks of linguists is to search for a new paradigm for all the interpretations of linguistic phenomena which is able to face contemporary challenges. One of these paradigms is Ecolinguistics, which is viewed as the umbrella term for a number of approaches. It can be defined as: 1) the study of the process and the activities through which human beings - at the individual, group, population and species level - exploit their environment, and how these processes are represented in discourse, 2) the study of the organismic, societal and ecosystemic limits of such processes and activities, i.e. the capacities necessary for upholding a sound and healthy existence for both human and non-human life on all levels. This vision is (a) based on a naturalized and realist philosophy of science, and (b) comprises the various dimensions described in the state of the art essay by Steffensen and Fill (2014: 16). Since my task is not to deal with the historic and theoretical background of Ecolinguistics - which has been dealt with, among others, by Fill and Mühlhäusler (eds. 2001), Alexander (2009), and Stibbe (2015) - , but to provide an insight into my vision of this paradigm and its validity ‘Small is Beautiful’ in English Mass Media Texts 143 to the research suggested here. Two major strands of Ecolinguistics have to be mentioned: the first one focuses on the psychological and sociological ecology of languages (Haugen 1972); the second one emphasises the relations between the language system and the environment and the process of constructing discourse through various language units/ phenomena and observing their influence on the environment (cf. Halliday 2001). This research follows the second strand with the notion of mutual impact in focus. Within this approach ―our ‗reality‘ is not something readymade and waiting to be meant - it has to be actively construed […] by the language evolved in the process of, and as the agency of, its construal‖ (Halliday 2001: 179). Thus, the consideration of language units influencing and being influenced by the environment is one of the principles of Ecolinguistics, its major tasks being to raise the environmental awareness of human beings by singling out and critically analysing the language constructions that frame the environment. Framing is understood in this paper in terms of Cognitive Linguistics as a schematization of experience, which is represented at the conceptual level and relates elements and entities associated with a particular culturally embedded scene, situation or event from human experience (Evans 2007: 85). Another task of Ecolinguistics that is relevant to this research is ―to draw into question the positive connotation of all-growth words like growth-rate, enhancement, advantage, surplus, head-start, record, victory, pole-position, think big… and to get rid of the idea that stagnation equals shrinking‖ (Fill 1995: 509). 3. The ‘Small is Beautiful’ ideology and its underlying fundamentals The issues of size, amount, and value, reflected in the grammar and semantics of languages, have always been of key importance for people. The metaphoric patterns of growth reveal that the interrelations between quality and quantity are deeply engraved into human consciousness. The ideology of growthism, labelled as a kind of anthropocentrism by Fill (1995: 509), is profoundly entrenched in Western forms of speaking and is also widely encountered in so-called traditional societies (Mühlhäusler 2003: 132). Moreover, it has a definite directional axiology. Halliday argues that ―among the properties construed by the grammar as gradable, most have a negative and a positive pole: for example, with ‗good‘ and ‗bad‘, ‗good‘ is construed as positive. So the quality of a thing means either ‗how good or bad it is‘ or ‗the fact that it is good‘, but never ‗the fact that it is bad‘.‖ (2001: 194). [‗Grammar‘ is used here with the meaning of ‗the language system‘, A.G.]. Stibbe‘s evaluations and appraisal patterns, dealing with the axiological notions of good and bad, and conceptual metaphors according to Nataliia Goshylyk 144 Cognitive Linguistics, affirm the distribution of the existing positive and negative patterns (2015: 83-105). His detailed analysis testifies the existence of good/ big and bad/ small patterns, but does not answer the question of their coexistence and dissemination in contemporary discourse. The roots of this grammar of ‗big‘ being the grammar of ‗good‘, as opposed to the grammar of ‗small‘ being the grammar of ‗bad‘ (cf. Halliday 2001: 194), lies deeply in human consciousness. If something is small, it presumably will get bigger, will grow and reach its optimal size, since small entities/ objects etc. are not supposed to stay small. Mühlhäusler emphasizes ―the experience of children that grown-ups are more powerful‖ and he speculates that ―getting tall and growing derives its positive value also from human experience with plants that tend to be maximally useful in their fully grown state‖ (2003: 132). Apart from natural biological experience, human beings actively construct numerous ‗big/ good ideas and concepts‘ in various spheres and discourses. Fascinated by figures, society progressively rationalizes its productive capacity; yet, such production and consumption does not always result in personal satisfaction. The habit of quantifying the intangibles orients all aspects of a person‘s endeavours for the achievement of personal satisfaction toward the consumption of commodities. (Chawla 2001: 120) Thus, the question of the big/ small correlation encompasses various spheres of human existence, like philosophy, linguistics, economy etc. The philosophical movement Small is beautiful, which criticizes our modern unsustainable economy and economic growth, was created by Schumacher (1973). The very expression came from a phrase of his teacher Leopold Kohr, an Austrian born economist, lawyer and political scientist, known for his opposition to the ―cult of bigness‖ (1957). Schumacher‘s book Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered (1973) brought the critique of Western economics to a wider audience during the late 20 th century energy crisis and the emergence of globalization. Schumacher not only criticizes conventional economic thinking for failing to measure the appropriateness of an activity, but also emphasizes that ―growth is good‖ and ―bigger is better‖ is relevant to the mass production in developing countries. This scholar was one of the first economists to question the appropriateness of using gross national product to measure human well-being, emphasizing that the aim ought to be to obtain the maximum amount of wellbeing with the minimum amount of consumption. In the epilogue to his book, he emphasizes the need for the ―philosophy of materialism‖ to take second place to ideals such as justice, harmony, beauty, and health, emphasising that the guidance we need for the work ―to put our own inner house in order‖ cannot be found in sci- ‘Small is Beautiful’ in English Mass Media Texts 145 ence or technology, the value of which utterly depends on the ends they serve; but it can still be found in the traditional wisdom of mankind. 4. Linguistic and historical glimpses on the notion of sustainable development Sustainability and sustainable development have become trendsetters in global 21 st century discourse. Constructing a coherent vision on sustainable development has become a major task for the international community, national governments, policy-makers, and other stakeholders. Halliday emphasizes that ―a language is a metastable system, which can only persist by constantly changing in interaction with its environment. The slowest part of it to change is the grammar […]. The lexis is much more accessible; indeed, we already have our slogans for the new age, based on words like sustain; what we need now, we are told, is sustainable development‖ (2001: 195). The analysis of the usage of the lexemes sustainable/ sustainability by means of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) testifies that the 21 st century has witnessed the rapid and constant growth of the frequency of their appearance in all types of discourse available in the corpus, i.e. spoken, fiction, magazine, newspaper and academic texts. Compare the figures in Table 1: Table 1: Frequency of sustainable/ sustainability in COCA Time span Frequency (% per million) 1990-1994 12. 81 1995-1999 16. 32 2000-2004 17. 72 2005-2009 29. 93 2010-2012 35. 91 The word usage analysis also shows a range of collocations with the words sustainability/ sustainable, which denote abstract notions (development, use, management, growth, future etc.), environmental resources (forestry, water, fisheries, seafood, harvest, land etc.), economic terms (agricul- Nataliia Goshylyk 146 ture, energy, economy, business, production etc.), and social terms (society, living, communities, leadership, health, education etc.). The frequency of the use of the phrase ‗sustainable development‘ in mass-media discourse was different in different years, e.g. the period from 1990 to 1994 shows 36 usages, 1995-1999 - 15, 2000-2004 - 22, and 2005-2009 - 19. Thus, the overall increase of the use of sustainability cannot be proved by a frequency analysis of its collocations, though it may be explained by the increase of the number of its collocations and further segmentation of the basic notions. Despite the recurrent usage of these words in connection with numerous institutions dealing with sustainability managing (e.g. the United Nations University Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability, International Institute for Sustainable Development, Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, the Schumacher Institute for Sustainable Development, and other institutes for sustainable development functioning at major universities in Europe, the USA, Australia etc.), the problem of defining the notion of sustainability has not been solved yet - neither for the academic community nor the global public opinion. The framework of sustainability generally emerged in a number of conferences between 1972 and 1992 with topics concerning environmental law and the promotion of intergenerational equity with respect to natural resources, the UN Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm in 1972 having been the first major international gathering to discuss sustainability at the global scale. In 1987, the famous Brundtland report initiated a generalized vision of sustainable development, defining it as follows: ―Development that meets the needs of current generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs‖ (Brundtland 1987: 54). In this very report, the challenge to arrive at a commonly accepted definition of ‗sustainable development‘ for all the actors in the development process, is verbalized (1987: 56). According to Theis and Tomkin (2012), the contemporary idea of sustainable development is to improve the quality of life for all people and therefore ranks among historical human social movements such as those for human rights, racial equality, gender equity or labour relations. The Sustainable Development Summit held by the United Nations in September 2015 set a 2030 agenda for sustainable development and outlined 17 sustainable development goals, integrating and aiming at a balance of the three dimensions of sustainable development: economic, social and environmental ones. Among these goals are ending poverty, achieving food security, promoting well-being for all at all ages, ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education, achieving gender equality, ensuring water/ energy sustainability, promoting economic growth and sustainable industrialization, reducing inequality among countries, making sustainable cities, combating climate change etc. ‘Small is Beautiful’ in English Mass Media Texts 147 This paper investigates mass-media articles focusing on a new era in sustainable development, which consider social, economic and environmental dimensions as elements of a coherent whole, working for the good of the people and the planet. The articles have been chosen from the newspaper The Guardian of 2015 (from the Sustainability [accessed at www.theguardian.com/ sustainability] and Environment [accessed at www.theguardian.com/ uk/ environment] sections) on the basis of their potential to address the 17 sustainable development goals, since for ―ecolinguistics, what is important is not just temporary communities formed by specific texts, but the larger communities that are formed by common appraisal patterns which appear in ‗countless texts repeated daily all around the world‘, to use Halliday‘s expression‖ (Stibbe 2015: 86). Overall, 53 articles have been studied in the course of this research, of which only a limited number is presented in this paper. Unfortunately, the role of linguistics in framing sustainable development discourse has so far been underestimated, with other disciplines in the social sciences and humanities playing a more important part. Despite a range of works on sustainable development in Ecolinguistics (e.g. Alexander 2002) and linguistic sustainability (e.g. Fill and Mühlhäusler 2001, Fill and Penz 2007), linguistics and linguists look like this in the eyes of scholars of the field: Linguistics and its suband cognate disciplines can make significant contributions to sustainability discourses that are concerned with the future development of society. A shift from ‗the sustainability of languages‘ to ‗languages for sustainability‘ would present a more holistic approach to issues of human and educational rights. However, as yet, the discourse of SD (sustainable development) has no great presence in language studies research. As such, it is hardly considered to be a ‗typical‘ topic in discussions on sustainability, both within and outside academic research (Sundsbo et al. 2015: 202). Thus, one of the major goals of linguistics, with all the tools and possibilities of Ecolinguistics being in focus, should be a complex analysis of sustainability as a discourse-generating phenomenon of the 21 st century. 5. Conceptual metaphors as modes of understanding and framing media discourse: MORE is UP There is a vast scope of linguistic research on conceptual metaphors, which fully covers all the important trends dealing with these conceptual entities from the point of view of Cognitive Linguistics (e.g. Lakoff/ Johnson 1980, Lakoff 1987, Goatly 1997, Evans 2007, Gibbs 2008, Kövecses 2010). Nataliia Goshylyk 148 This paper will focus on the dynamic relations between metaphors and their environment from the point of view of Ecolinguistics. So far, conceptual metaphors have been analysed from the ecolinguistic perspective by a number of researchers: Fill (2010) discusses both theoretical aspects of metaphor theory and shows how metaphors we think with are realized non-linguistically in many aspects of contemporary life: building tall, levels of obesity, industrialization, use of time, travelling fast, urbanization, racial categorization and exclusion, medical practice, sexual behavior, militarization, evaluations of quality by quantity, commodification of nature, treatment of animals, education and the concept of progress. Mühlhäusler (2003) outlines the functions of environmental metaphors (control, suppress, mislead, liberate and empower) and shows two principal tasks of Ecolinguistics in the field of metaphoric analysis, viz. ―to make the role of metaphor in the perception of and interaction with the environment explicit and to help search for replacements for those metaphors that have perpetuated an unsustainable way of life‖ (Mühlhäusler 2003: 140); Döring (2008) introduces an ecolinguistic theory of metaphors based on different research strands on metaphor, which covers six basic functions of metaphor in discourse (the ubiquity of metaphor, the conceptual foundation of metaphor, the conceptual foundation of Idealized Cognitive Models, the necessity of metaphor, the creativity of metaphor, and the focusing aspect of metaphor) (ibid.: 147-148); Goatly (2001) analyses grammatical and lexical metaphors and shows how clusters of metaphors may contribute to certain worldviews (cf. Goatly 2001). Døør and Madsen introduced the conception of ―healthy food metaphors‖; they do not subscribe to the view that the mind is embodied, preferring a theory that says ―that persons are multi-dimensional beings with our mind, body, heart, brain, spirit, and social relations being our irreplaceable dimensions‖ (Døør/ Madsen 2007: 277). Stibbe (2015) presents a theoretical basis for metaphoric reasoning and reveals permanent destructive and constructive cognitive patterns in discourse. In this paper, we regard metaphors not as static entities, but as dynamic phenomena that ―adapt to the discursive and practical needs of those who use them in socio-natural context‖ (Döring/ Nerlich 2006: 56). Moreover, metaphors, shaping and being shaped by their environment, are considered as discourse-generating phenomena with the sustainable development context allowing interactive and cooperating management for its participants. Industrial culture, functioning on the global scale, being consumer oriented and ―overshooting the sustaining capacity of the natural systems, is based on the metaphorical thinking of earlier thinkers who were un- ‘Small is Beautiful’ in English Mass Media Texts 149 aware of the environmental limits‖ (Bowers 2009: 4-5). One of the greatest challenges of modern civilization is not just the acknowledgement of those restrictions, but also active responsibility for sustainability management. Sustainable development discourse, as it is understood in the 21 st century, both recognizes those limits and emphasizes the necessity for joint individual and community actions aiming at minimizing the negative consequences of unsustainable practice and focusing on the destructive impact of anthropocentrism. Within this approach, the correlation of big/ small issues has attracted the attention of scholars in various fields. The economist Schumacher argues that human experience is dual in nature: What must be emphasized is the duality of the human requirement when it comes to the question of size: them is no single answer. For his different purposes man needs many different structures, both small ones and large ones, some exclusive and some comprehensive. … For constructive work, the principal task is always the restoration of some kind of balance. Today, we suffer from an almost universal idolatry of gigantism. It is therefore necessary to insist on the virtues of smallness -where this applies. (If there were a prevailing idolatry of smallness, irrespective of subject or purpose, one would have to try and exercise influence in the opposite direction) (1973: 49, italics mine). The philosopher Kohr, talking about the efficiency and glory of the small, emphasizes the roots of big: It was the knowledge derived from the Quantum Theory that has enabled us to penetrate the secret of the atom and, with it, of the entire universe. We found the key to the big by searching for the small, and it is not without significance that our age, which has developed such perverse yearnings for social colossalism and world embracing organizations, is not named the colossal or unitarian age, but the atomic age, not after the largest but after one of the smallest aggregations of matter (1957: 82, italics mine). In linguistics, the notions of big and small, good and bad are research topics in Cognitive Linguistics, axiology (value theory), Ecolinguistics and other fields. The traditional conceptual metaphors MORE is UP, GOOD is UP, i.e. MORE is GOOD are frequently spotted in various discourses, with sustainable development discourse being no exception. These metaphors are based on the interaction of the concepts of QUALITY (good), AMOUNT and DEGREE (more) and DIRECTION (up), functioning in the roles of target and source domains respectively. Here we understand quantity in terms of verticality. Nataliia Goshylyk 150 This may be illustrated by numerous examples found in English mass media texts (from now on all the phrases in italics and bold are my emphasis), e.g.: The initiative appears to have the support of the majority of shoppers in England, with 62% thinking it is reasonable to charge 5p for all carrier bags a 6% increase on 2012, a poll for the Break the Bag Habit coalition of litter charities found … (‗England's shoppers say goodbye to free plastic bags‘, Guardian, October 5, 2015). In this discourse sample, the conceptual metaphors MORE is UP and GOOD is UP are actualized. The domains MORE and UP are revealed by the reference to the increase of the percentage of people supporting the idea of the introduction of a charge for carrier bags. The target domain GOOD is understood by means of the noun support, defined as ―the approval, encouragement, or comfort‖, with approval being ―the belief that someone or something is good or acceptable‖ (OED). In discourse, these metaphoric mappings coexist with the controversial conceptual entities LESS is GOOD and LESS is UP, which so far have not been analysed thoroughly in theoretical publications and only rarely in empirical research. This may be exemplified with metaphors from sustainable development discourse. Thus, in the sentence ―Facebook, Arby‘s and Bank of America, among others, have taken up the challenge to reduce their energy use over the next decade‖ (about Facebook, Bank of America and others having committed themselves to cutting their energy use by 20% on January 29, 2015), the phrase taken up activates the verticality frame, reduce activates the quantity frame, and together they activate the metaphor LESS is UP. 6. Analysis of empirical data The analysed articles on sustainable development in the British mass media allowed me to single out five major clusters of conceptual metaphors with quantity and direction target domains in focus: Cluster 1 - MORE is GOOD and MORE is UP Cluster 2 - LESS is GOOD Cluster 3 - MORE is BAD Cluster 4 - LESS is UP Cluster 5 - MORE is UP and LESS is UP/ GOOD. Cluster 1 encompasses the traditional metaphoric mappings MORE is GOOD and MORE is UP. ‘Small is Beautiful’ in English Mass Media Texts 151 An article on the solar school projects in the UK warning that a charitable scheme installing solar panels in schools in England and Wales might be threatened, if cuts to the feed-in tariff go ahead, says: The government estimates that more than £70m a year - and the lion‘s share generated by supermarkets - will be raised for good causes across England (‗Solar schools project threatened by renewable energy cuts‘, October 7, 2015). 1 The phrase ―more than £70m will be raised for good causes‖ activates the target domain of amount and the source domain of quality, resulting in the activation of the MORE is UP and MORE is GOOD metaphorical mappings. The metaphorical inferences are that: 1. Raising money for solar school projects is a good undertaking; 2. Collecting a greater amount of financial resources is beneficial to its participants and the environment; 3. Accumulating these financial assets moves its parties to a higher vertical position. MORE is UP/ GOOD is a deeply engraved metaphor with all human beings. It is common across cultures, seems physically real and is embedded in our experience. It is cognitively productive and profoundly fixed in thought and language. Once recognized, the mapping seems straightforward: the ordering of amount is projected to the ordering of direction/ quality, and inferences are achieved straightforwardly for the source domain and mapped to the target domain. Cluster 2 represents the metaphoric mapping LESS is GOOD, which often frames the sustainable development discourse and is framed by it. Numerous examples testify that the target domain LESS is activated by phrases like heavily reduced that problem; bag numbers to fall by more than 70%; cutting the number; cut their greenhouse gas emissions; to cut their energy use by 20%; energy reduction plans; reduce air conditioning use. As one might notice, the target domain expressing the concept of quantity may be activated by the lexemes of smallness and be supported by concrete figures, which are absolute and relative representatives of quantity. Within this cluster the source domain GOOD is represented either explicitly or implicitly. The direct representation is provided by word combinations and phrases with the unambiguous meaning of being superior in quality, e.g.:  The Better Buildings Challenge is a voluntary program in which the participants commit to cut their energy use by 20% over 10 years and provide 1 All the articles analysed are from The Guardian. Nataliia Goshylyk 152 progress reports on how they are reaching that goal. The energy department offers technical assistance and matches participants with financial institutions that have agreed to help them carry out their energy reduction plans. (‗Facebook, Bank of America and others committed to cutting their energy use by 20%‘, January 29, 2015).  You can imagine the important role that lighting plays for a retailer like Macy‘s. The department store cut its energy use by retrofitting lighting systems, upgrading heating and cooling equipment and use analytics software that collects data in 15-minute intervals in order to figure out ways to reduce wasteful energy consumption. (‗Facebook, Bank of America and others committed to cutting their energy use by 20%‘, January 29, 2015);  The real estate development and management company aims to reduce the energy footprint of a collection of military housing communities. Its approaches included fixing leaky ducts, improving building insulation and creating better ventilation to reduce air conditioning use. (‗Facebook, Bank of America and others committed to cutting their energy use by 20%,‘ January 29, 2015). In all these examples, GOOD/ BETTER is linked with REDUCTION of some kind, thus representing the metaphor LESS is GOOD. Indirect activation of the quality concept is achieved by means of contextual factors, as in the following samples (all from The Guardian): In England the average person goes through nearly 12 thin-gauge bags per month, while in Wales, where there has been a 5p charge per bag since 2011, shoppers use just two per month. (‗England‘s shoppers say goodbye to free plastic bags‘, Oct. 5, 2015). The notion of ‗benefit‘ is understood by means of the general line of the article focusing on preventing further damage to the environment, as well as (in this example) concerning the calculation of the number of plastic bags used in Wales and in England:  On the basis of charging elsewhere, the government expects bag numbers to fall by more than 70% - cutting the number ending up in landfill or in the oceans by many billions every year (‗England‘s shoppers say goodbye to free plastic bags‘, Oct. 5, 2015). Understanding of the advantage of the planned action is reached via the promise of minimizing the phenomenon which is a threat to the environment and its sustainable functioning (billions of plastic bags in landfill or in the ocean). ‘Small is Beautiful’ in English Mass Media Texts 153 I speak to the young people there and they say they don‘t want to move. This is where our ancestors came from,‖ said Timon, who is a Pacific outreach officer at the Edmund Rice Centre in Sydney. ―Displacement really has to be the last resort. Pacific islands need help to adapt and the rich countries need to cut their greenhouse gas emissions. (‗UN drops plan to help move climatechange affected people‘, October 7, 2015). Realization of the beneficial effect of the planned action is achieved by means of the introduction of the chain of relations involving necessity to move (negative) - young people‟s displacement attitude (negative) - condition of the Pacific islands (negative, needs help to adapt) and the possibility to change that negative consequence of events, which is viewed positively. ―When processing source domain words in the context of a target domain subject matter, the fixed connections result in co-activation of the two domains‖ (Gibbs 2008: 28). Thus, source domain GOOD activations arising from inferences are projected onto the target domain LESS by means of the pre-established mapping. As attested by empirical analysis, the new conceptualization of the domain of quality is obtained through a projection from reduced quantity. Cluster 3 represents the metaphoric mapping MORE is BAD, which also conveys the idea of ―small is beautiful‖ in sustainable development discourse. A number of articles abound with examples of this type of metaphor, such as the article ‗UN drops plan to help move climate-change affected people‘ (The Guardian, October 7, 2015), from which the following examples are taken:  In areas of the Pacific, sea level is rising by 1.2 cm a year, four times faster than the global average. For coral-based islands two to three metres above sea level this has resulted in communities being relocated, and drinking water and crops are threatened by salt water inundation. Recent research suggests islands will not be submerged but will change shape and height, posing difficulties for fixed infrastructure… In wealthy nations such as the US, where people in Alaska have had to move and Boston faces a future of being a ‗city of canals‘ because of sea level rises. The target domain MORE is verbalized directly via the verb/ noun rise, while the source domain BAD is activated both contextually (relocation of communities/ had to move) and directly (threat/ posing difficulties);  People in Kiribati are now very worried about climate change. They say, ‗No wonder it‟s getting hotter that it‟s hard to find fish.‘ Nataliia Goshylyk 154 The implicit representation of the difficulty of successful fishing is accompanied by an explicit verbal message of the increase of the temperature level:  I think every country in the world responsible for CO2 emissions have some measure of responsibility for the predicament they‘ve caused. Top of that list is Australia, given it is the worst per capita emitter in the world. This discourse sample directly activates the target domain MORE (top) and the source domain BAD (worst). The metaphoric inferences occur due to the activation of the antecedent situation, which leads to the activation of the other meaningful node (the consequence of CO2 gas emissions for every country). Cluster 4 with its metaphor LESS is UP is not so frequently represented in our corpora of articles, which may be explained by its contradiction to human embodied experience. According to Gibbs (2008: 116): metaphors are processed by accessing the metaphorical abstraction and applying it (via structural alignment) to the target - essentially treating the base term as a category of which the target is an instance. This shift from horizontal to vertical alignment is not coincidental; rather, it is a natural consequence of the structural alignment process used to interpret novel metaphors. The following example testifies the possibility of seeing the correlation etween quantity and verticality in reverse order: Tech giants, fast food chains and financial institutions are the latest companies to commit to improving their energy efficiency, according to the US energy department. Facebook, Arby‘s and Bank of America, among others, have taken up the challenge to reduce their energy use over the next decade, the department announced Thursday. (‗Facebook, Bank of America and others commit to cutting their energy use 20%‘, January 29, 2015) The target domain LESS is introduced via the phrase to reduce their energy use, while the word combination have taken up the challenge activates the source domain UP (cf. above). Despite certain metaphors being grounded via correlations in embodied experience, others come from our social awareness and environmental knowledge. They frame the contemporary discourse, though do not abound in quantity. The metaphor LESS is UP simplifies the relations between progress and motion along a line which has not yet been thoroughly analysed, neither within metaphor theory nor within the Ecolinguistics framework. ‘Small is Beautiful’ in English Mass Media Texts 155 The final cluster 5 represents the conceptual entities MORE is UP and LESS is GOOD/ UP coexisting in discourse. The following discourse passages are analysed as a group, on the basis of their potential to express a common idea, as in the article ‗Emissions scandal: how the drive for diesel ran out of gas‘ (The Guardian, September 30, 2015): But with climate change a growing concern, diesel‟s lower carbon dioxide emissions caught the attention of politicians looking for easy ways to cut carbon. Sales of diesels in Europe crept up from 15% of new cars in 1990 to 25% by 1995, as politicians cut the taxes levied on diesels. In this passage, the traditional metaphoric mapping MORE is UP in the second sentence goes side by side with the metaphor LESS is GOOD, in which the source domain GOOD is understood contextually, by means of understanding the metaphoric inference of cutting gas emissions and the benefit of this for the environment.  A Decc spokesperson said: ―Our priority is to keep bills as low as possible for hardworking families and businesses, while reducing our emissions in the most cost-effective way. The government‘s support for solar has driven down the cost of the technology significantly and we delivered more than the promised subsidy amount to the industry.‖ In this discourse sample, the target domain LESS is activated by means of the phrases as low as possible and drive down, while the source domains of both metaphors are based on the verbalization of the domain MORE, which is activated by the noun priority, defined as ―the fact or condition of being regarded or treated as more important than others‖ (OED), and the phrase we delivered more. Both notions have a positive denotation, and this positive effect is also understood contextually. These metaphors are ubiquitous and highly organized forms of conceptualizing environmental experience. The potential of these metaphoric mappings is derived from their ability not only to assimilate new experiences to familiar patterns of perception, but also to coexist in the discursive environment and to be dynamic. 7. Conclusion The analysis has attempted to show how metaphors can elucidate the complex reality of the quality-quantity-direction relationship. The ecolinguistiс paradigm employed in this research is based on the principles of the active construal of reality, the mutual interdependence of its components and the idea of language units as influencing and being in- Nataliia Goshylyk 156 fluenced by their environment. The conceptual metaphors denoting quality, quantity and direction, deeply engraved into human consciousness, frame the contemporary discourse of sustainable development, which is at the top of the world policy-makers‘ agenda. In sustainable development discourse, the classical metaphoric mappings MORE is GOOD and MORE is UP coexist with the metaphors LESS is UP and LESS is GOOD, with some metaphors being grounded in embodied experience, others coming from our social and environmental awareness. Both of these conceptual entities are discourse-generating; they were constructed by society, and their use may have an influence on the environment. The latter metaphoric mappings, being novel and therefore particularly influential, frame the ecological, economic, and e-living styles. The results of this research facilitate the recognition of culturally unique and ecologically sensitive ways of perceiving both the environment and the process of human development. Moreover, they contribute to making us aware of the growthism ideology, which is anthropocentric and thus (! ) profoundly entrenched in language. This awareness may eventually lead to a more ecocentric worldview. References Alexander, Richard J. (2002). ―Everyone is talking about ‗sustainable development‘. Can they all mean the same thing? Computer discourse analysis of ecological texts.‖ In: Alwin Fill, Hermine Penz & Wilhelm Trampe (Eds.). Colourful Green Ideas. Bern/ Berlin: Peter Lang. 239-254. Alexander, Richard J. 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Nataliia Goshylyk Vasyl Stefanyk Precarpathian National University