ABSTRACT
This chapter examines erasβure, which can be described as a story in people’s minds that an area of life is irrelevant, unworthy of consideration or unimportant. This underlying story is conveyed in texts when ‘something important’ that is present in reality is missing from texts which describe that reality. There are three main kinds of erasure: ‘the void’, where something important is completely missing from a text; ‘the trace’, where it is present but backgrounded; and ‘the mask’, where it is present but in a distorted form. Ecolinguistic analysis of erasure can serve two purposes. The first is highlighting that something of importance has been neglected in certain texts or discourses. The second is providing details of the linguistic techniques responsible for the erasure, making it possible to modify those aspects in an effort to bring that area of life back to mind.
