ABSTRACT
We explore how linguistic choices, both lexical and grammatical, reflect various stances towards nonhuman animals. We survey research of three kinds: linguistics work on animal communication and representations of animals, animal studies work that considers incidentally the role of language in human–animal relations and ecolinguistics work centrally focused upon language about animals. We explore themes such as the definition and classification of animals; differences between scientific and other discourses; animal erasure; and the degree to which language encodes anthropocentric, anthropomorphic and human-exceptionalist stances. For illustration, we draw upon our own research, which combines corpus assisted discourse analysis, interviews and focus-group data.
