An Ecolinguistic Analysis of the Environmental and Political Discourses in Ecuador: The Yasuní ITT Referendum in 2023 Case Study

This thesis figures the analyses of the linguistic features of the discourses given by a climate activist and a politician that influenced citizens' vote for Yasuni ITT Referendum in Ecuador in 2023. For this study, the text is taken from the Ecuadorian National Electoral Council’s official debate about whether or not to agree or disagree with the exploitation of fossil fuels resources in Block 43 of Yasuní National Park in the northern Ecuadorian Amazon. Therefore, two subcorpora were created, the Activist and the Politician. Their arguments supported a Yes and a No across the debate and were subject to an ecolinguistic analysis to discover the narratives that describe Ecuadorians’ perceptions of ecological features, in particular the Amazon. This thesis explains the intersection of language and ecology, the ecologistic analysis through Stories (Stibbe, 2021) and the lexical indicators ecological discourse analysis LEDA (Brombal, Conti, Szeto, 2024), the understanding of Yasuni ITT Referendum and the long-lasting dependency relationship that Ecuador has had with the fossil fuels industry. This research is intended to set a base on the study of ecolinguistics locally and regionally, and explore how environmental and political discourses affect citizen’s engagement on decision making processes that affect nature.