Metonymy in Greta Thunberg’s Climate Change Discourse on Facebook

The issue of climate change, which still remains among one of the most significant challenges to humanity (Han et al., 2024; Malhi et al., 2020), is routinely addressed by politicians and public figures, such as, for instance, the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg (Mansikka-aho et al., 2024). This article introduces and discusses a study that focuses on Greta Thunberg’s discourse on climate change, which she shares on the Social Networking Site (SNS) Facebook in the form of status updates. In particular, the study sought to identify conceptual metonymy in a corpus of Thunberg’s Facebook status updates on climate change. The study was grounded in the tenets of cognitive linguistics, which considered metonymy a conceptual phenomenon. Specifically, Kövecses and Radden’s (1998) typology of conceptual metonymy guided the identification of metonymy in the corpus. The results of the corpus analysis revealed that Thunberg used such types of conceptual metonymy as part for whole, whole for part, place for event, place for institution, and actor for action. The findings are further presented, illustrated and discussed in the article.