SIGNALING NON-ENDORSEMENT IN PERSUASIVE DISCOURSE: THE CASE OF GREENWASHING

Abstract

The paper examines texts on greenwashing, a relatively recent phenomenon, focusing on linguistic expressions that signal dissociative or non-endorsing attitude towards propositional constituents or entire propositions. Following the idea that all content words potentially encode procedural information, the study explores whether expressions whose conventional meaning is primarily conceptual may give rise to procedural effects in the specific context of persuasive discourse. The corpus consists of English-language texts on greenwashing drawn from journalistic, consumer-oriented, and popular academic sources. Lexical expressions potentially signaling non-endorsement were manually extracted, and a representative set of the most frequent items (so-called, allegedly, supposedly, and claim) was selected for qualitative pragmatic analysis. The analysis shows that while these expressions primarily contribute conceptual content, in persuasive discourse they may additionally constrain the inferential route by triggering a non-endorsing interpretation.