Phraseology and Culture in English

SUSTAINABLE
+ N 
sustainable development sustainable 
scale 
sustainable forest 
sustainable solutions 
sustainable living 
adv.
+ SUSTAINABLE 
ecologically sustainable 
economically sustainable 
Sustainability is a hot topic in environmental language. Multiwords contain-
ing sustainable are found on both sides of the fence. As Alexander suggests: 

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292
Melina Magdalena and Peter Mühlhäusler 
Everyday experience shows that sustainable development is used, on the 
one hand, by business people to refer to their industrial and business opera-
tions. On the other hand, environmentalists attempting to prevent further 
ecological devastation of global resources, such as air, water, forests and 
land, also use it. Against this background it is difficult not to agree with the 
British historian, Eric Hobsbawm’s comment on the term as being ‘conven-
iently meaningless’. (Alexander 2002: 248). 
2.3.3. Environmental
One of the major groups of lexical phrases in our data includes environ-
mental as a component which is used to organise anything and everything 
relating to this topic. Like the emotive affix eco-, environmental is a legiti-
mising unit, which enables a myriad range of things and activities to be 
included with this discourse. 
ENVIRONMENTAL
+ N 
environmental accounting 
environmental justice 
environmental altruism environmental 
language 
environmental art 
environmental management 
environmental audit 
environmental movement 
environmental benchmarks 
environmental music 
environmental biology 
environmental organisations 
environmental campaign
environmental philanthropy 
environmental capacity 
environmental policy 
environmental concern 
environmental preservation 
environmental conditions 
environmental problem 
environmental degradation 
environmental protection 
environmental focus 
environmental racism 
environmental fundraising environmental 
resources 
environmental groups 
environmental science 
environmental impacts 
environmental surprises 
environmental improvement environmental 
waste 
environmental issues 

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Lexical developments in greenspeaking
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2.4. Collocation 
It is difficult to distinguish clearly whether a multiword is a lexical phrase or 
a collocation. It depends to some extend upon how firmly the term is estab-
lished in the discourse of a particular group of language users. Our exam-
ples reflect the language of those who are either greenies and / or work in 
the environmental domain. Like the spelling changes that occur with affixa-
tion and compounding, as indicated above, multiword formation in envi-
ronmental language can be observed as a fluid and dynamic process which 
is still evolving. This section includes information specifically on a number 
of collocations noted in our data. 
One way of analysing environmental language is to divide texts accord-
ing to a number of topics, such as “climate” or “policy”. Texts on these 
topics contain lexical items which are specific to the region under discus-
sion, whether that be “the global community”, “the developing world” or 
“the Australian desert”. Specific collocations from economic, scientific or 
religious discourses can also be grouped topically.