The rise of carbon neutral and compensation carbone

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a corpus-based diachronic study of the migration of vocabulary from the language of ecology into non-scientific language and vice versa. The results are extracted from a bilingual (French and English) comparable corpus compiled for the study. We show that if terms can get de-terminologized over time, words which have become widespread in the media can, in return, get terminologized over the years and move into the lexicon of ecology, as is the case in English with carbon neutral. We also show that the popularity and productivity of the prefix eco- in English does not seem to apply to éco- in French, probably because of the syntactic and semantic competition with the modifier bio. The recent emergence of compensation carbone in the French media is also discussed.