Towards an emplaced ecolinguistics: a critical engagement with Ecolinguistics and Emplacement

1 Introduction

Human engagement with the living world has changed over time through continuous exploration and reflection. What was once viewed as mysterious became an object of scientific study, and later a site of ethical and ecological concern. These changes mark a gradual shift from exploitation to care, and from working in isolated disciplines to collaborating across fields. Each stage reflects an effort to rethink how humans live within and depend on their environments. The growing use of terms such as “environment”, “nature”, “ecology”, and “place” therefore signals not only a richer vocabulary, but also new ways of knowing, valuing, and imagining the living world.

Within this evolving conceptual and disciplinary landscape, ecolinguistics occupies a distinctive place. As a field primarily concerned with meaning, it draws together insights from linguistics, ecology, and related areas, forming a genuinely interdisciplinary space of inquiry. Its intellectual lineage is often traced to Haugen (1972), who proposed an “ecology of language” that situates linguistic activity within interconnected mental and social environments. From this perspective, language is not a fixed code but a set of practices co-constituted with places and social relations. The 1990s marked a decisive turning point. Halliday’s (1990) catalytic lecture, together with subsequent developments, including the discursive turn (e.g. He et al. 2021; Poole 2022; Stibbe 2015, 2024) and the cognitive turn (Steffensen and Fill 2014; Steffensen et al. 2024a), among others, has helped to shape the field’s contemporary form, with an understanding that the languages we use, the languaging we engage in, and the discourses and practices we produce both reflect and actively construct our lifeworld, with far-reaching ecological and social effects. Recognizing that many of these meaning-making processes and discursive constructions are ecologically problematic, ecolinguistics now calls for critical examination of the ideologies, thought-patterns, and communicative mechanisms that underpin them. The goal is to understand how such patterns shape the human-lifeworld community (Fill and Penz 2018; He et al. 2026; Stibbe 2015) and to foster futures grounded in diversity, interaction, coexistence, and harmony (Zhang and He 2025).

From an epistemological standpoint, ecolinguistics operates at the interface between the material and the symbolic. On one hand, it resonates with the empirical concerns of the natural sciences, recognizing that mountains, rivers, flora, and other material entities become meaningful through language. On the other hand, it engages with the social sciences and humanities, where language functions as a medium through which cognition, cultural imaginary, and ontological orientations are shaped and shared. In this sense, ecolinguistics represents an emplaced inquiry that is grounded in lived material worlds while also attentive to the discursive and cultural practices that mediate human-environment relations. It is with this belief that the present paper reviews the recently published collection Ecolinguistics and Emplacement: Language, Languaging and Place co-edited by Stephen J. Cowley, Martin Döring, and Sune Vork Steffensen in 2025, exploring how the field might evolve toward a more emplaced orientation that generates both local and global relevance.

The discussion begins with a summary of the collection’s central arguments, situating them within the broader trajectory of ecolinguistic research. It then examines the conceptual architecture of emplacement and its analytical relevance for ecolinguistic inquiry. Building on this foundation, the discussion reviews current research that engage with emplacement-oriented perspectives, particularly studies addressing the spatial, cultural, and relational dimensions of language in place. On this basis, the article turns to the emplaced triad proposed in the collection, assessing its adequacy in light of recent developments in ecolinguistics and considering possible refinements that may better align it with emerging and future trends in emplaced ecolinguistic research. Beyond the triad, it also explores how Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) could contribute to a more comprehensive framework for emplaced ecolinguistic analysis. The article concludes with a synthesis of key insights and an outlook on future directions for the field.

2 Ecolinguistics and Emplacement: an overview

One year after the publication of Language as an Ecological Phenomenon: Languaging and Bioecologies in Human-Environment Relationships (Steffensen et al. 2024a), the editors reunite to further investigate the relationship between language and place. Continuing their belief of language and languaging as inherently ecological phenomena, their new collection, Ecolinguistics and Emplacement: Language, Languaging and Place, advances this discussion by exploring the more intricate dynamics between language, emplaced ecological processes and the spatial contingencies of living beings.

Ecolinguistics and Emplacement: Language, Languaging and Place comprises an introduction by Martin Döring, Stephen J. Cowley and Sune Vork Steffensen, followed by nine chapters. As the editors explain, the collection is “organized around a narrative thread that brings an ecolinguistics of languages and languaging to both empirical studies and how these bear on theoretical ways of exploring languaging, places and linguistic emplacement” (Cowley et al. 2025: 12). In the introduction, the editors briefly trace the disciplinary trajectory of ecolinguistics, noting its predominant focus on language analysis and discourse studies. They observe that much existing research has examined how places are constructed through linguistic representations or enlanguaged performances. However, they identify a persistent gap, which is the limited recognition that “languaging is necessarily emplaced” (Cowley et al. 2025: 10), and the lack of attention to how humans, nonhumans, and places are intertwined through enlanguaged practices. While acknowledging the representational power of language, the editors argue that the true practical and ethical significance of ecolinguistics lies in understanding how linguistic actions are enacted and mobilized within situated practices. Grounded in this perspective, they link ecolinguistics with the notion of “place”, conceived as a phenomenon that integrates natural, social and cultural worlds together, and as a dynamic passage between the human and the more-than-human (Steffensen et al. 2024b).

The collection brings together nine contributions that collectively explore how languages and acts of languaging are co-constitutive with place, advancing an ecolinguistics that is materially, socially, and spatially situated. For analytical clarity, the nine chapters can be grouped into two broad sections. The first four develop theoretical perspectives on ecolinguistics and emplacement, while the remaining five present empirical investigations that extend and ground these theoretical insights. Collectively, the theoretical chapters offer a programmatic opening towards an emplaced ecolinguistics. Chapter 1 re-grounds the ontology of language in spatial logic; Chapter 2 advances a normative orientation toward sustaining life-enabling relations; Chapter 3 redefines the discipline as a transformative science; and Chapter 4 provides a methodological demonstration of Ecological Discourse Analysis (EDA).

In Chapter 1, “The spatial logic of language,” Edwards Baggs establishes the ontological foundation for the collection’s overarching theme of emplacement. Rejecting Chomsky’s placeless conception of rational cognition and symbolic representation, Baggs offers a theoretical justification for understanding language through a spatial logic. Drawing on Wolfgang Köhler’s studies of the mental life of chimpanzees, Jean Piaget’s observations of children’s marble play, and historical analyses of measurement systems, he argues that an ecological approach to language must view symbols as the culmination of evolutionary, developmental, and historical processes that “originate in concrete, physical space and abstraction occurs only later” (Baggs 2025: 38). This chapter thus positions ecolinguistics as a discipline capable of critiquing and reconfiguring mainstream linguistics at its philosophical core. Beyond this ontological intervention, Baggs proposes that ecolinguistic inquiry should operate within specific domains of activity, addressing concrete problems in particular places rather than making sweeping generalizations about the nature of language. This is a productive direction, though in practice ecolinguistics can and arguably should pursue both, not only engaging with situated cases but also developing frameworks that connect insights across places.

In Chapter 2, “Building ecocivilizations: Putting ecolinguistic expertise to work,” Stephen J. Cowley presents a vision of how ecolinguists might cultivate new ways of acting through academic narratives. He provides a fresh conceptual focus by shifting attention from the often co-opted notion of “sustainability” to that of “life-sustaining relations” (Cowley 2025: 42). Rather than aligning with growth-oriented economic paradigms, Cowley argues that ecolinguistics should address how language contributes to maintaining ecological, social and biological systems. Within this orientation, languaging is placed at the center, as an embodied and coordinated activity through which people link familiarity, appearances and experience of lived worlds with models of Earth systems. Critically engaging with Steve Fuller’s social epistemology, which he regards as overly anthropocentric and confined to established knowledge, and with Fritjof Capra’s complexity/ecoliteracy framework, which he considers too abstract and detached from practice, Cowley positions ecolinguistics as a middle path, which is practice-oriented, attentive to both knowledge and action, and open to lived incompleteness. Cowley’s detailed illustrations reaffirm what ecolinguistics has long aspired to be. It is not only an interpretive or commentary-oriented enterprise, but also an intervention science capable of informing social and ecological change. This vision aligns with the aims of many ecolinguists, though what remains less developed are the concrete methodologies and collaborative infrastructures needed to realize it in practice. Notably, Cowley draws on the Chinese constitutional framework, the ecocivilization project, and Chinese philosophical and geo-historical traditions, treating them as both distinctive in the global context and instructive for ecolinguistic theorization worldwide.

In Chapter 3, “Ecological linguistics: On the path to a critically transformative science?” Wilhelm Trampe advances a complementary vision of ecolinguistics as a theoretically unified and critically transformative discipline. His argument unfolds through three key moves. First, clarifying what ecology means in linguistics by distinguishing biological, trans-biological and normative dimensions; second, conceptualizing language as a form of life within language-world systems drawing on an ecosystem analogy; and third, constructing a Kuhnian disciplinary matrix that integrates models, symbolic generalizations, shared values and exemplar problems. Trampe’s ecological definition of language, “a dynamic anthropogenic sign system used to establish relationships and meanings in humans’ interactions with themselves as well as with their social, cultural and natural environment, of which they are a part” (Trampe 2025: 71-72), stands in deliberate contrast to formalist or disembodied accounts, emphasizing that language is always embedded and ecologically consequential. Like Cowley, he critiques sustainability communication and linguistic practices such as euphemism, taboo and obfuscation and calls for a practice-oriented ecolinguistics that moves beyond commentary and toward intervention. While largely conceptual and metaphorically framed, the chapter makes a valuable contribution by articulating ecolinguistics as a critically transformative science.

In Chapter 4, “Ecological discourse analysis: A unified perspective,” Zhang Ruijie and He Wei develop a framework for EDA, aiming to bring greater conceptual integration and methodological consistency to the field. The framework provides ecolinguistics with a replicable approach for evaluating how discourse sustains or undermines life-supporting relations. They present EDA as a top-down, functionally oriented procedure that operates across macro-, meso-, and micro-levels, moving from values to genres or corpora, and finally to linguistic choices (Zhang and He 2025: 92-93). Drawing primarily on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), and integrating compatible approaches such as content analysis, corpus linguistics, and cognitive framing, the model establishes a systematic pathway from ecological principles to linguistic practice. By incorporating ecological notions such as niche, community dynamics, and mutualism, and grounding analysis in the four ecosophical pillars, namely diversity, interaction, coexistence, and harmony, they link discourse analysis directly to spatially organized systems. They also invite analysts to consider whether a discourse strengthens life-supporting relations within a given locale, or conversely, erases or dislocalizes them, thereby transforming emplacement from a thematic concern into an operational analytical criterion. At the same time, they treat discourse as a contextualized practice, making place analytically visible through SFL resources such as transitivity, appraisal, theme and rheme, and crucially, circumstantial or locative framing. In this sense, the chapter provides a methodological backbone for the concept of emplacement as it translates place from a philosophical orientation into a set of analytical procedures, evaluative criteria, and comparative parameters. Ultimately, it enables ecolinguistics to systematically investigate, and potentially enhance, how discourses contribute to sustaining life in specific places.

Taken together, the first four chapters present emplacement not merely as a thematic focus but as a structuring principle that shapes inquiry, guides critical reflection, and informs practical engagement. Emplacement, in this formulation, is not metaphorical but structural. Once traced to living processes, languaging and discourse emerge as inseparable dimensions of an ecologically situated and socioculturally mediated reality. This orientation challenges abstract models that treat language as a self-contained system, insisting instead that analysis be conducted in situ within the environments, relations, and practices through which discourse unfolds. The remaining five chapters extend this orientation by demonstrating how emplacement can be operationalized through concrete practices and case studies, thereby linking theoretical reflection to ecological and social realities.

In Chapter 5, “Priolo narratives: Evaluation and emplacement in South-East Sicily,” Douglas Ponton and Anna Raimo analyze narratives from visitors to the Priolo Salt Pans Nature Reserve in South-East Sicily, a site where natural and industrial interests intersect. Using a Hallidayan appraisal framework, they examine speaker evaluation resources and discourse pragmatics across three interviews. Their analysis reveals that the respondents portray the reserve as a unique eco-cultural space, where the embodied experience of being there invokes the participants’ eco-conscious awareness and its genesis and application. In Chapter 6, “ ‘I had a lamb I brought everywhere’: An ecolinguistic analysis of metaphors in children’s poems during the 2001 FMD crisis in the UK,” Martin Döring combines ecolinguistic metaphor analysis with the notion of lifescapes to explore poems written by children after the 2001 foot-and-mouth disease outbreak. He investigates how enlanguaged children grasp the impact of FMD on lifescapes and places through metaphorical imagination, showing that the poems constitute emplaced practices rooted in lived places, landscapes and bodies. Metaphors such as “deathly silence” weave together humans, animals, viruses, and environments into lifescapes charged with grief, remembrance and social connection. Pursuing the human-animal relations in situ, in Chapter 7, “Anthropocentrism and the human-animal relationship: Language problems and solutions,” Reinhard Heuberger shows how anthropocentric resources, including euphemisms, metaphors and dictionary bias, displace animals and reduces them to human-centered categories (e.g. farm animals, pests). By exposing these biases and suggesting educational interventions, Heuberger calls for re-situating animals in physiocentric language as beings embedded within shared ecological and ethical lifeworld rather than as mere resources. In Chapter 8, “What do they miss? An ecolinguistic approach to everyday language practices by inhabitants of the Polish-Czech Border area,” Magdalena Steciąg and Urszula Majdańska-Wachowicz turn toward a Haugen-inspired inquiry into how language itself is emplaced within the Polish-Czech border region. Their analysis presents this borderland as a living linguistic ecosystem where everyday communication emerges from a multilingual reality and relies on translanguaging that operates metaphorically and literally, beyond the monolingual language practices of the two nations. Finally, in Chapter 9, “Local and global discourses about managing Norfolk Island,” Peter Mühlhäusler offers a historical and interdisciplinary perspective on the interplay between local and global discourses on Norfolk Island over two centuries, combining environmental-historical approach with TEK. He shows that the island’s material conditions tightly couple language, livelihood, and management practices, and argues that ecological and social resilience emerges only when governance and language remain rooted in the island’s specific environment, history, and community.

For readers with a broad interest in language and place, the collection provides a valuable conceptual anchor, which is a coherent framework that links ecolinguistics and emplacement through accessible case studies and representative examples. For specialists in ecolinguistics, the environmental humanities, and adjacent disciplines, it offers refined conceptual tools and methodological insights that can enrich ongoing debates, even where some of its premises remain open to scrutiny. For instance, while the editors productively identify three dimensions of emplacement, namely locale, sense of place, and location (Cowley et al. 2025: 18), their treatment risks stretching the concept to the point where it becomes a catch-all term for contextualization. This openness is part of the collection’s strength as it invites diverse applications and fosters cross-field dialogue. Yet it also raises important questions about how precisely emplacement should be defined and how rigorously it ought to be theorized within ecolinguistics. In what follows, I first review prior studies that help clarify this trajectory and then sketch some tentative proposals that may extend this discussion.

3 Tracing the genealogy of emplacement

Work in human geography since the 1970s has established “place” as more than a point on a map. Places are meaningful spaces anchored in felt experiences and practice (Relph 1976; Tuan 1974). In this sense, physical affordances such as landform, climate, and weather matter, but places also condense histories, traditions, communities, and cultural memory. Thus, a place is a node in wider flows, constituted by social relations that stretch across spatial and temporal scales (Massey 1991). As Tuan (1979: 387) observes, a place “is not only a fact to be explained in the broader frame of space, but it is also a reality to be clarified and understood from the perspective of the people who have given it meaning”. Building on phenomenology, Casey (1996: 9) foregrounds place as “the most fundamental form of embodied experience”, shifting attention from abstract time-space to concrete emplacement as an ongoing event of “getting into, staying in, and moving between places” (Casey 1996: 44). Casey (1996: 28) also regards place as collectively shared and “denoted, described, discussed, narrated” through place terms embedded in a culture. In this view, our ongoing emplaced experiences continually bind us to place and to emplace is to recognize “that we are not only in places but of them” (Casey 1996: 19).

A brief historical account of the concept helps clarify what the term has come to mean. The term entered technical vocabulary via a military register. In the Dictionnaire Militaire (Aubert de La Chesnaye Des Bois 1745: 241), the phrase “l’emplacement des batteries” (“the emplacement of batteries”) referred to the strategic positioning of artillery, already implying the deliberate organization of space in relation to function and purpose. A bibliometric scan of Web of Science (24 September 2025; title/abstract/keywords = “emplacement,” English only) identifies 18,115 publications, showing that the concept has become well established in academic discourse. Most of these studies (around 70 percent) fall within the earth sciences, where emplacement describes the intrusion and setting of magmatic bodies or ore deposits and serves as a key lens on mineralization and geological formation processes. Beyond geology, the term also appears in fields such as engineering, hydrology, oceanography, astronomy, and environmental science (about 10 percent), where questions of spatial positioning and structural transformation continue to be central.

Over the past decade, the concept of emplacement has also gained traction in the social sciences and humanities, though such work represents fewer than two percent of all publications. In these fields, it is used to explore how social life, cultural practice, and political identity are grounded in specific places. In sociology and human geography, studies often focus on migration and community formation, tracing how belonging, social capital, and policy boundaries take shape through emplacement (e.g. Glick Schiller and Çağlar 2016; Örnlind and Forkby 2024; Reed-Danahay 2019; Wessendorf and Phillimore 2019). In anthropology and heritage studies, the concept foregrounds the power dimensions of place, for example, how museum exhibits emplace visitors within national narratives (Chronis 2012) and how indigenous painting expresses ties to ancestral land (Myers 2013). Across these domains, emplacement functions as a cross-scalar analytic that connects geological formations, institutional structures, and intimate social practices, while maintaining a central focus on how form, process, and location co-produce meaning and value.

Sociological and anthropological studies often use narratives to reveal how identity, boundary work, and power are tied to place (e.g. Arslan 2019; Dalmau 2018; Higgins 2017), underlining the need to specify the linguistic mechanisms by which place is enacted. In linguistic geography, constructivist work argues that place is not merely where meaning is projected but where it is produced, making subjectivity integral to place formation (Berdoulay 1989). Geosemiotic approaches extend this view by showing that signs are not only about places but also in them as the physical placement of discourse helps organize interaction and confer social meaning (Danos 2022; Scollon and Scollon 2003). Building on this trajectory, Pennycook (2010) reconceives language as situated activity that both arises from and shapes local contexts, aligning language, space, and practice as mutually constitutive. Discourse-analytic work likewise demonstrates how spatial organization influences genre, style, modality, and access to knowledge in both physical and digitally mediated environments (Keating 2015; Zhang and He 2018). These lines of inquiry converge with the contextual tradition in functional linguistics, which extends from Malinowski’s notion of the “context of situation” through the work of Firth and Halliday to interactional perspectives that emphasize the co-construction of meaning in use (Duranti and Goodwin 1992). Related work directs attention to speech situations (Hymes 1974), to indexical presuppositions and entailments (Silverstein 2003), and to how territorial arrangements and ideological formations shape discourse (Agha 2007). Together, these traditions identify a repertoire of linguistic resources such as deixis and indexicality, circumstantial or locative framing, transitivity and participant configuration, appraisal and stance, metaphor and intertextuality, through which discourse becomes emplaced within social practices and material-institutional settings.

The preceding review indicates that emplacement is best understood as a dynamic concept that integrates (1) material environments and infrastructures, (2) embodied and habitual practices, and (3) the semiotic processes through which meaning is produced. From a linguistic standpoint, it is neither a loose synonym for “context” nor a mere thematic label for “place”, but a structuring principle that explains how meaning acquire force through their spatial positioning, the activities they coordinate and the institutional or biotic arrangements they sustain and transform. Framed in this way, emplacement directs ecolinguistic attention to how linguistic practice is embedded in, and responsive to, wider ecological lifeworlds. This orientation, in turn, prompts a series of concrete questions: Which features of places are foregrounded or erased in linguistic choices? How do situated utterances sediment into routines and repertoires of practice? In what ways does languaging, as embodied and coordinated activity, mediate alignments between local practices and macro arrangement? As the editors observe, “language, languaging and place become nodes where human and nonhuman communities constitute situated lifeworlds engendered by life sustaining relations” (Cowley et al. 2025: 8).

4 Integrating emplacement into ecolinguistics: current developments

Before the appearance of Ecolinguistics and Emplacement: Language, Languaging and Place, a dispersed yet influential body of work had already drawn attention to language-in-place. Across stylistics, discourse studies, and linguistic geography, scholars converged on the view that place is neither a neutral backdrop nor a mere referent, but a constitutive dimension of meaning-making (e.g. Virdis et al. 2021). This earlier scholarship laid important foundations for an emplaced ecolinguistics attentive to how discourse is situated, embodied, and materially anchored.

A 2022 special issue of the Journal of World Languages on ecostylistics illustrates this orientation with unusual density, showing how place and discourse are co-constitutive and how this relationship shapes perception and action. Read across genres, the contributions identify tractable linguistic mechanisms for the place-discourse nexus. One line of argument explains how discursive choices configure the very ontology of place, which is something not simply “there” but is continuously produced, reshaped, and governed through language. Drawing on Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Text World Theory, Vermeulen (2022) shows how prophetic language “grows” a green city by blending urban and natural world-builders in Third Isaiah, unsettling the classical city-wilderness divide and reopening what counts as the urban. Panagiotidou (2022) traces how the container image schema and construal operations structure Diane Seuss’s opening poem so that landscape becomes a medium for felt confinement and for an anthropocentric stance in which nature is made to “hold” the psyche. Using a stylistic model of opposition, Virdis (2022) examines speakGreen micro-texts, showing that negation, parallelism, and color-coding privilege license beneficial over destructive stories and script ecological stances in digital public space. A second line of argument demonstrates that situated environments shape discursive form, reminding us that environmental discourse is never abstract but always grounded in particular places. Alarcón-Hermosilla (2022) combines Frame Semantics and Conceptual Metaphor Theory to explain how specific landscapes in Theroux and Kaplan evoke distinct ambiances. The study shows that adjective-driven framing sustains empathetic immersion in one text and analytical distance in the other. Chrzanowska-Kluczewska (2022) reads Miłosz’s The Issa Valley through multilevel figuration to argue for an “existential ecology” in which childhood landscapes provide the rhetorical backbone of the narrative. A third, reciprocal approach makes the co-constitution of language and place explicit. In Adami (2022), the proposition of “place is text” treats Roy’s Delhi, Kerala, and Kashmir as text-world architectures built through point of view, figuration, and defamiliarization. Here place offers both materials and constraint, as discourse redistributes value and agency across human and nonhuman participants.

Beyond ecostylistics, a broader range of discourse-analytic studies aligns with an emplaced perspective by showing how environmental meanings emerge at the intersection of material settings, social positions, and semiotic choices. Ethnographic research in a minority ecological region of Yunnan, China (Zhuo and Xue 2017) analyzes public discourse surrounding a local guesthouse sewage incident and demonstrates how speakers’ discursive practices are patterned by relational position, media access, identity, and value commitment. Seen through the lens of emplacement, the case connects location (tourism infrastructure, wastewater routes, regulatory interfaces) to locale (the village’s position within tourism and media networks) and to language practices distributed across unequal communicative resources. Similarly, Döring and Ratter (2018) analyze interviews with residents of three islands in North Frisia, Germany, mapping metaphors that shape perceptions of extreme weather. They find that recurring frames such as “enemy,” “punishment,” and “eco-dictatorship” index locally salient experiences of storm tides, shifting seasons, and coastal change, translating them into concrete responses such as compliance with dyke management or skepticism toward external regulation. Media discourse around China’s Yellow River provides another register of emplacement. Using appraisal analysis within a harmonious discourse framework, Cao and Li (2023) show how news features construct ecological narratives that align readers with national policy, promote conservation values, and script desirable forms of participation in river protection. The analysis reveals a sense of place grounded in historical memory, cultural value, and affective attachment mediated by evaluative language and narrative framing, and scaled up to institutional agendas. Urban semiotic landscapes extend these insights. In a multimodal analysis of Chongqing, Bonato (2024) demonstrates how advertising symbolically produces spatial knowledge by combining representational resources with historical-mythic codes, fusing ecological imagery with consumer aspiration and recasting land as both environmental symbol and luxury commodity.

Taken together, these studies show that meaning making is a situated practice of dwelling that arises within and contributes to maintaining concrete ecological niches. Metaphor, image schema, framing, figuration, oppositional patterning, and narrative world-building are not free-floating textual devices. Instead, they unfold through what can be conceptualized as a Five-E model of situated meaning-making: they are temporally embedded (keyed to prophetic futurity, childhood retrospection, or real-time micro-posts), emplaced (anchored in specific cityscapes, valleys, and travel corridors), embodied (shaping affective experiences such as confinement or empathy), encultured (shaped by genre conventions, religious imaginaries, and media platforms), and biologically entangled (responsive to nonhuman agencies, seasonal rhythms, and species inhabiting the described scenes). In this sense, language functions as a mode of niche construction and a semiotic activity through which human and nonhuman agents co-create and sustain their shared environments.

What we are witnessing is a gradual refinement of focus within ecolinguistics and a turn toward making place analytically explicit. The research surveyed here, together with the collection’s five empirical chapters, traces a trajectory where analysts increasingly ask not only what environmental discourse says, but where and how it is said, by whom, and with what material and multispecies entailments. Within this development, the editors foreground three interrelated aspects, namely location, locale, and sense of place, as a provisional scaffold for operationalizing place in ecolinguistics (Cowley et al. 2025: 18). Taken together, these dimensions direct analysis toward material-institutional arrangements, affective-mnemonic orientations, and networked positionalities across scales. The aim in what follows is to take this scaffold seriously, translating each term into workable indicators for discourse, languages, and languaging, while also considering how the triad might be refined further.

5 Revisiting the location-locale-sense of place triad

As outlined in the collection, place is conceived, broadly in line with (Agnew 1987), as the braided interplay of location (spatial, physical, and ecological processes or characteristics), locale (the activities, practices, and languaging carried out in a given locus), and sense of place (lived, subjective, and culturally mediated meanings articulated through languages and languaging). By foregrounding these three aspects, the editors suggest that the concept of place can catalyse methodological and empirical improvement. Although they stop short of presenting a fully developed model, the nine chapters together show how ecolinguistic inquiry can make place analytically visible, sometimes by emphasizing a single dimension and sometimes by weaving two or all three into a more integrated account.

A location-oriented reading situates discourse, languages and languaging within the material and ecological specificities of place, and examines how linguistic practice both responds to and resists these constraints. Within the collection, the Priolo Salt Pans study exemplifies this relation by positioning interview narratives at the wetland-industrial interface, showing how proximity to brine pans and refinery perimeters influences evaluative lexis and stance (Ch. 5). Over longer temporal horizons, Mühlhäusler’s account of Norfolk Island illustrates how policy and media frames can either remain aligned with island ecologies and livelihoods or displace them through imported models, with measurable consequences for linguistic representation and governance (Ch. 9). The theoretical chapters reinforce this spatial anchoring. Baggs conceptualizes symbols as abstractions that develop from spatially situated activity rather than as pre-existing mental entities (Ch. 1), while Zhang and He translate location into a measurable variable within a systemic functional framework (Ch. 4), linking ecological settings to linguistic patterning. Through these contributions, the collection models location as both a material baseline and an analytical reference point against which linguistic practice can be calibrated, compared, and ultimately evaluated.

A locale-oriented perspective foregrounds discourse, languages, and languaging as forms of coordinated practice, focusing on how genres, routines, and institutional procedures sustain or undermine life-supporting relations in particular contexts. Several chapters operationalize this orientation by taking genres such as tour talk, interviews, classroom and community tasks, policy briefs, and even dictionary entries as analytic units. The Polish-Czech border study, for instance, reframes translanguaging not as a deviation from monolingual norms but as a routine mechanism of cross-community coordination, showing how multilingual practice functions as an infrastructure for everyday cooperation (Ch. 8). At a more programmatic level, Cowley conceptualizes languaging as embodied coordination that links familiar lifeworlds with planetary systems, warning against sustainability discourses that become detached from practice (Ch. 2). Trampe similarly argues that critique must be coupled with modifiable practices if ecolinguistics is to become transformative rather than merely diagnostic (Ch. 3). Methodologically, Zhang and He (Ch. 4) make this perspective particularly explicit by specifying a top-down process that moves from values to genre and register, and then to lexico-grammar. Their framework generates comparable indicators such as participant diversity and the explicitness of locative framing, giving locale a measurable profile across cases.

A sense-of-place orientation attends to how language confers presence and value upon places through the stories people tell, the metaphors people use and the ways people evaluate their surroundings. These semiotic choices are not just descriptive but also ethical, as they shape ways of knowing and caring for the world. In the collection, this orientation runs as a connective thread linking attention to place across genres and practices. Chapters 5–9 collectively illustrate how it mediates between material settings and situated practices. Döring’s analysis of children’s poetry (Ch. 6) traces networks of metaphor related to silence, kinship, grief, and memory that braid humans, animals, pathogens, and landscapes into lifescapes, showing affect as a vehicle for emplaced understanding. Likewise, Mühlhäusler’s account of Norfolk Island (Ch. 9) demonstrates that governance and resilience depend on whether public discourse remains anchored in TEK and island ecologies, positioning sense of place as both a normative and historical resource.

Taken together, the location-locale-sense of place triad provides a robust and generative framework for emplaced ecolinguistics. It anchors linguistic analysis in material settings, draws attention to situated practices, and makes attachments to place empirically observable. At the same time, close engagement with the collection’s chapters and with the wider literature indicates areas where the triad could be further refined. Four domains, in particular, invite extension and integration: (1) scale and temporality, (2) mobility and networks, (3) more-than-human agency, and (4) digital mediation.

Scale and Temporality Across the collection, place is frequently treated as a site or landscape, which is something that can be located, described or represented. Yet ecolinguistic processes rarely stick to a single scale or moment. They are multi-scalar, reaching from the intimacy of household routines to the wider dynamics of neighborhoods, watersheds, and even global supply chains. They are also temporal, unfolding through overlapping rhythms of events, seasons, institutional regimes, and long term ecological change. While Chapter 9 gestures toward this breadth, it does not yet offer a framework for analyzing how linguistic meanings move across scales or accumulate over time. As a result, comparisons that span multiple sites or duration remain largely ad hoc. Future emplaced studies would address this gap by making scale and temporality explicit by specifying their temporal grain (e.g. event, season, cycle, epoch) and spatial grain (e.g. micro, local, meso, regional). Tracing how meanings move across these grains would allow researchers to see how local discourse connects to broader systems and histories. In doing so, ecolinguistics could turn its intuitive sensitivity to duration and scope into a systematic comparative method, which is capable of showing how the temporal and spatial textures of language make certain environmental relations visible, while obscuring others.

Mobility and Networks The triad also tends to privilege bounded sites, yet the chapters repeatedly show that places are co-produced through movement and connection, such as the circulation of people, goods, species, and discourse. Translanguaging at the Polish-Czech border (Ch. 8) makes this mobility visible, yet in much of the research movement still appears as background rather than as an organizing principle. As a result, “elsewhere” often remains under-analyzed, even when it is woven into local discourse, for instance, in tourism imaginary at Priolo (Ch. 5), in the relay of policy and media frames on Norfolk Island (Ch. 9), or in the circulation of pedagogical labels critiqued by Heuberger (Ch. 7). Future work could make mobility more central by linking inter-place connections with on-site practices, tracing how linguistic forms, resources, and values travel between contexts and are reconfigured as they arrive. Doing so would reframe emplacement not as a fixed property of a location but as a relational effect, which is continually produced through movement, exchange, and interaction.

More-than-human agency Nonhuman actors such as animals, pathogens, landscapes, and infrastructures feature prominently in several chapters (notably Ch. 6 and Ch. 9), yet their agency is not treated as a distinct analytic focus within the triad. Without this attention, such entities risk being drawn back into human-centered accounts, which weakens the ecological reach. Recognizing more-than-human agency means asking how nonhuman does not merely form the backdrop to human action but actively shape it. Migrating birds can signal seasonal change; pathogens can reorganize patterns of social interaction; infrastructures channel and limit movement. Developing a more-than-human register that systematically traces these forms of participation would bring the framework into closer alignment with its ecological commitments. Such a register would show how species, cycles, and materials initiate events, set conditions, or constrain alignments. It would also help prevent the field from recentring the human under a new vocabulary of place.

Digital mediation The studies in this collection read policies, dictionaries, and media texts with care, but they pay less attention to the digital and technical systems that make those texts possible. Today, platforms, archives, sensors, and modeling pipelines do much more than simply store or distribute information. They filter what becomes visible, decide whose voices are amplified, and shape how categories of knowledge are organized and compared. These systems influence what counts as “local” knowledge just as much as the people who produce it. When they are treated merely as neutral tools or containers, their role in shaping discourse disappears from view. Yet sociotechnical systems, ranging from mapping platforms and monitoring sensors to online databases, are themselves part of how meaning is made. Positioning sociotechnical mediation both within locale (as everyday practice) and within location (as physical infrastructure) allows ecolinguistic research to ask how technologies actively participate in producing a sense of place, rather than simply carrying or reflecting it. Seeing them in this way reveals that digital environments are not outside language, but one of the ways in which place itself is continuously composed.

Taken together, these refinements do not displace the location-locale-sense of place triad but rather deepen it into a more coherent framework. A methodologically robust emplaced ecolinguistics would approach treat place not as a static site but as a multi-scalar, networked, and sociotechnically mediated assemblage that is continuously co-authored by humans and more-than-humans alike.

6 Beyond the triad: insights from TEK

In arguing for an emplaced ecolinguistics, the point is not only to showcase methods but to recognize that language-in-place cannot be advanced by linguistics alone; it requires non-linguistic foundations drawn from adjacent fields, such as political ecology, systems thinking, indigenous studies, and the environmental humanities. Within this broader horizon, TEK deserves particular integration, as it is closely aligned with this trajectory. Emerging prominently in the 1980s, TEK has been described as “a cumulative body of knowledge, practice, and belief, evolving by adaptive processes and handed down through generations by cultural transmission, about the relationship of living beings (including humans) with one another and with their environment” (Berkes 1999: 7). TEK is inherently place-based and a situated form of knowing and it cannot be disentangled from the environments in which it is produced and practiced (Lauer and Aswani 2009; Weir 2009). As a result, TEK offers grounded guidance for sustainable living (Nelson and Shilling 2018) as it arises from indigenous peoples’ long-term, intergenerational relationships with their lands and waters and from respect for natural cycles (Tsosie 1996: 286). Over decades it has made important contributions “in the fields of ecology, soil science, […] wildlife management, and water resource management” (Warren et al. 1993: 2).

TEK also treats language as a key dimension shaping thought, perception, time-space, and human relationships with the cosmos (Cajete 2018). Recent ecolinguistic work has already operationalized this premise in discourse analysis. A Kenya-based ecolinguistic study (Ondimu and Simotwo 2023) treats community folklore as a TEK repository, showing how declaratives, verb/agency patterns, emotive appeals, and lexical choices encode environmental knowledge and values, thereby offering actionable cues for conservation, land use, and biodiversity policy alongside scientific models. In another place-based study, Buonvivere (2024) shows how TEK informs Nanaia Mahuta’s speeches via metaphor, framing, and intertextuality, yielding an Indigenous-inspired adaptation framing that recognizes nature’s agency and prescribes cooperative, care-oriented responses, in contrast to Western extractivism. Across ecolinguistics, TEK is moving from the margins to the center as scholars from indigenous traditions reshape the agenda by bringing emplaced knowledges long absent from mainstream models. This shift creates two clear affordances for transmitting and guiding ecological attunement.

6.2 Providing emplaced semiotic resources

Beyond offering fine-grained, place-based ecological concepts for emplaced ecolinguistics, TEK also invites attention to the semiotic resources through which knowledge is created and communicated. These resources take the form of emplaced media, which are modes of expression shaped by the body, materials, and surroundings, where meaning is carried not only through words but also through movement, texture, and rhythm. In such media, knowledge is preserved not as fixed rules but as embodied cues that guide how to perceive, respond to, and value a place.

A vivid example comes from the traditional Chinese calligraphic style Xing Shu (行书, ‘running script’), which illustrates languaging as an embodied ecological practice. In works such as Lanting Xu (《兰亭序》, ‘Preface to the Poems Composed at the Orchid Pavilion’) (see Figure 1), the brush does far more than record lexical meaning. The speed, pressure, and lift of each stroke register the writer’s breath and posture, while also responding to the immediate environment, such as light, atmosphere, and the social and emotional mood of the gathering. Through this interaction, each stroke becomes a trace of emplacement, translating a lived, sensory moment into a visible and tactile sign that later readers can re-experience with their eyes and hands. Viewed in this way, calligraphy reveals language as both symbolic and kinaesthetic. Its form arises from bodily movement and environmental engagement, showing that linguistic expression is inseparable from the physical and ecological conditions that sustain it. For ecolinguistics, such practices exemplify how meaning is not only represented in language but also enacted through the dynamic interplay of body, medium, and place.

Figure 1:

Lanting Xu (‘Preface to the Poems Composed at the Orchid Pavilion’). Note: Lanting Xu is a piece of Chinese calligraphy work generally considered to be written by the well-known calligrapher Xizhi Wang (王羲之, 303–361 CE). The original copy of Lanting Xu has been lost. It is believed that this is a copy by Suiliang Chu (褚遂良, 596–658 CE). This copy is currently preserved in the Palace Museum, Beijing. Source: https://www.dpm.org.cn/collection/handwriting/228277.html (accessed 10 October 2025).

Chinese painting with inscriptions offers a complementary illustration. In his Ink Bamboo and Rock Scroll (see Figure 2), Xie Zheng (Banqiao Zheng, 1693–1765) demonstrates how the coordination of hand, brush, ink, and the locally familiar pairing of bamboo and rock encodes site-specific ecological knowledge. The work distills monsoon winds, humid air, shallow-slope soils, and the seasonal rhythms of southeastern bamboo into a visual lexicon and grammar passed down through generations. This grammar is not only descriptive but also prescriptive, guiding conduct and perception. The motifs of bamboo and rock teach resilience joined with flexibility, grounding balanced by endurance, and rhythm shaped by pauses and voids. Through such conventions, ecological observation is translated into rules of attention and action, including where to linger, when to withhold, and how to situate work and shelter within a landscape. Ethically, the scroll embodies a relational ethos of humility, restraint, and reciprocity toward place. The seals and calligraphic inscriptions tie knowledge to community, history, and locale, making the artwork both a record of lived ecology and a medium for ethical instruction. In this sense, the bamboo painting does not simply depict nature; it enacts an emplaced understanding of how to live well within it.

Figure 2:

Painting Ink Bamboo and Rock Scroll by Xie Zheng. Note: This hanging scroll painting is currently preserved in the Palace Museum, Beijing. Source: https://www.dpm.org.cn/collection/paint/229708.html (accessed 10 October 2025).

Taken together, these place-based modalities show how TEK provides emplaced semiotic resources that ecolinguistics can engage with both analytically and methodologically. They reveal that language is never only verbal: it is sustained by non-linguistic media such as gesture, craft, inscription and image that give words their ecological grounding. Such forms supply the semiotic scaffolding through which meanings of place are sensed, stored, and transmitted across generations. Analysts might therefore look for similar alignments elsewhere: how bodily movement, texture, rhythm, or spatial composition convey ecological relations; how metaphors of balance, flow, or resilience are enacted through media other than language; and how visual or tactile forms work with words to guide perception and ethical response. Through such analyses, ecolinguistics becomes a genuinely emplaced semiotics: one that studies how language, material form, and ethical relation co-produce each other within living ecology.

7 Conclusion and future direction

Ecolinguistics has long engaged in self-reflection on its disciplinary foundations (e.g. Bang and Trampe 2014; Fill 2001; Finke 2018). The central idea developed in Ecolinguistics and Emplacement: Language, Languaging and Place is that language is in and of place, shaped by local histories, ways of life, and ecological conditions. This perspective helps to clarify both what the field has already achieved and where further refinement is possible. Recent work has enriched ecolinguistics through detailed analyses and thoughtful critiques of public discourse (Ha 2023; Steffensen 2025; Zhang 2022). The book builds on this work by turning attention to the small-scale, situated practices through which people engage with soils, waters, species, and institutions in the routines of everyday life. This focus not only complements earlier approaches but also opens new directions for developing ecolinguistic theory and method.

As discussed in Section 5, the triad of location-locale-sense of place is best understood not as a checklist but as a flexible analytic framework that can be further sharpened. Its adequacy can be enhanced by making scale and temporality explicit, tracing how meanings move across levels, recognizing that what is “here” is shaped by mobilities and networks, bringing more-than-human participation into view, and maintaining awareness of the sociotechnical mediation that produce what counts as “local.” In practical terms, these dimensions can be examined through indicators that operate at discursive and behavioral levels. Examples include (1) explicit scale markers observed in lexical, clausal or movement cues that locate events in time and space; (2) nonhuman participant roles, identified through the grammatical or semantic positioning of species, materials, and technologies as agents (Zhang and He 2020); (3) inter-place referential density traced in textual connections or clusters of events that link multiple locales; and (4) references to platforms, data, or interfaces as causal mediators identified through the logical patterns that organize discourse or action.

While discourse analysis continues to offer valuable insights, this collection approaches languaging as a broader process that brings language and practice into a shared frame. From the perspective of language as a system, patterns in words, grammar, and prosody can be read as traces of how people have historically interacted with their environments. They reveal, for example, who or what is granted the status of subject, how agency is assigned or concealed, how events are grounded in particular circumstances, and how deixis and rhythm signal spatial or seasonal relations. From the perspective of languaging as activity, attention turns to how people coordinate with one another and with their surroundings in real time, when guiding a tour on a salt pan, repairing equipment during a storm, conducting fieldwork in class, performing rituals, or reading and reporting sensor data. In these moments, speech interweaves with gesture, tools, and terrain as part of an embodied and situated practice. Viewed this way, language is not only something people use, but something they do together with the world around them. Methods such as multimodal ethnography and interaction analysis then could help make this visible, showing how language works precisely because it is always situated somewhere.

Interdisciplinary engagement follows naturally from this perspective. As discussed in Section 6, TEK grounds ecosophical reflection in lived relations with place, showing how emplaced media such as seasonal lexicons, ritual narratives, and craft inscriptions make meaning tangible and material. Building on this insight, ecolinguistics can draw on conceptual tools that themselves carry a sense of emplacement. These can be ideas that keep scale and seasonality in view, that make more-than-human participation visible, and that treat sociotechnical mediation as part of how locality is produced. When such constructs, informed by TEK and neighboring fields, guide inquiry, they enable triangulated forms of evidence in which linguistic analysis stands alongside situated practice and material traces such as phenology logs, river gauges and pollution metrics. In this way, emplacement clarifies not only what linguistic forms emerge, but why there and then, and with what ecological consequences.

Finally, an emplaced ecolinguistics grows most convincingly through collaboration with people who live and work in particular places. Partnerships with river-basin agencies, indigenous councils, museums and archives, schools, and local media can ground research in real landscapes and communities. Sharing analytical tools while keeping local voices and media at the center helps ecolinguistics move from talking about environments to working alongside people who care for them. Through such collaboration, scholars and communities can co-create ways of speaking that help people notice, name, and respond to what matters where they live. In this sense, an emplaced ecolinguistics is less a fixed theory than a habit of attention. It keeps place analytically visible and holds language accountable to the worlds it helps shape.