ABSTRACT
This chapter will give an account of a discourse study looking at how the category of 'nature' was constructed in a public inquiry. It will attempt to reveal four different constructions of nature: the process in which they were strategically used as arguments; and the relationship between argumentative strategies and existing sources of power. This analysis is theoretically novel in that the analytic unit used was not a 'repertoire', defined in terms of grammatical construction but a 'discourse', defined in terms of implied social relationships.
