Klimat i jego pole leksykalne jako słowa klucze współczesnego dyskursu publicznego
Climate and its Lexical Field as Keywords of the Contemporary Public Discourse

Summary/Abstract: This paper presents increased frequency of vocabulary related to climate and health in public discourse and the position of this vocabulary in Polish and foreign word of the year contests. The first part of the text discusses the notion of keywords, methods of their distinction, and word frequency monitoring works at the University of Warsaw. These works are composed of: 1) monitoring of the frequency of the vocabulary in daily newspapers against a comparable corpus covering 12 months, 2) selection of the word of the month from the most frequent words and describing it in philological terms, 3) word of the year contests using the most frequent words as propositions. The second part of the paper presents individual words from the lexical field of climate selected as words of the month and of the year, such as upał (heat), nawałnica (a storm), smog (smog), drzewo (a tree), puszcza (a forest), klimat (climate). Part three demonstrates words from this lexical fi eld in Polish and foreign word of the year contests. The discussed lexical field was divided into working categories: 1) “What the nature can do to a human being”, e.g. nawałnica (a storm), smog (smog), and 2) “What a human being does to the nature”, e.g. drzewo (a tree), puszcza (a forest) (tree cutting in a forest), klimat (climate) (climate change). The latter category gathers words with a greater symbolic power, more abstract, more appropriate as keywords in the long run.

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