UDTR — Radar mondial des droits de la Nature

ANIMACY, TRANSITIVITY, AND READER RECEPTION: A CORPUS-BASED ECOLINGUISTIC STUDY OF ROBERT MACFARLANE'S IS A RIVER ALIVE?

Identification

Clé publique

doi:10.68156/zjw05119

Auteurs

Natasha Mustafa · Marya Sarwar · Nida Ashiq · Shumaila

Année déclarée

2026

Langue déclarée

en

Type source

article

Première détection

2026-11-09T19:04:47.670710+00:00

Dernière observation des métadonnées

2026-11-09T19:17:28.411143+00:00

Dernière vérification HTTP

Non effectuée

Institutions déclarées par la source

University of Okara

Pays d’affiliation déclarés

PK

Résumé documentaire — langue originale

Rivers are conventionally treated in English discourse as inanimate resources bodies to be measured, dammed, and managed rather than beings with standing of their own. This study asks whether literary language can reverse that convention, and whether such a reversal is measurable rather than merely impressionistic. Using a corpus-based ecolinguistic approach, the study analyses the complete 106,649-word corpus of Robert Macfarlane's Is a River Alive? (2025) through the combined lenses of Arran Stibbe's Stories-We-Live-By framework, Hallidayan transitivity, and Robin Wall Kimmerer's grammar of animacy. Word frequency, keyword, collocational, and n-gram analyses were generated through a custom Python natural language processing (NLP) pipeline built on the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) and benchmarked against the British National Corpus; 200 concordance lines were qualitatively coded in NVivo; and a Linguistic Perception Questionnaire was administered to 150 Generation Z university students to test how readers respond to the text's grammatical strategies. Rivers were assigned the animate relative pronoun who over the inanimate which at a ratio of 8.5:1, the inverse of general English usage, and occupied the grammatical Actor role in over half of subject clauses through mental, verbal, and behavioural rather than purely material processes. Readers broadly endorsed the ethical implications of this language (82% agreed ecocide should be treated as a crime) more readily than its grammatical premises (49% were comfortable with the pronoun who for a river), and endorsement correlated positively with eco-anxiety (r = .52, p < .001) and varied by gender and faculty. The findings position literary animacy language as a measurable form of ecological resistance and carry implications for environmental communication, language pedagogy, and the Rights of Nature movement.

Identifiants

OPENALEX

W7221768047

DOI

10.68156/zjw05119

Repères documentaires

Famille documentaire

Doctrine

Types déclarés par les sources

article

Entités naturelles mentionnées

Fleuve / rivière

Les mentions d’entités ne constituent pas une preuve de reconnaissance juridique. La juridiction étudiée est distincte du pays d’affiliation des auteurs.

Sources

OpenAlex · Document 1 · Document 2

• DOI · https://doi.org/10.68156/zjw05119
• OpenAlex · https://openalex.org/W7221768047

Statut documentaire

Pertinence à examiner

Bibliothèque

Cette identité n’est pas encore intégrée à la Bibliothèque juridique.