Discourse markers in Keir Starmer’s speeches on climate change

• Published in: Studies in Linguistics, Culture and FLT (Online) Vol. 13; no. 1; pp. 8 - 26
• Main Author: Kapranov, Oleksandr
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Konstantin Preslavsky University of Shumen 2025; Шуменски университет »Епископ Константин Преславски
• Subjects: Applied Linguistics; Cognitive linguistics; Descriptive linguistics; Language and Literature Studies; climate change discourse; computerassisted study; Keir Starmer; political speeches on climate change; discourse markers (DMs)
• ISSN: 2534-952X; 2534-9538
• DOI: 10.46687/CUPP2991

Given that the United Kingdom (the UK) is seen as a world leader in addressing, mitigating, and prioritising the issue of climate change (Albanese et al., 2025), climate change appears to be a frequent theme in British political discourse. In particular, all major political actors on the UK, inclusive of the Conservative and Labour Parties, have their own agendas associated with the issue of climate change. Currently, however, there are no published studies on climate change discourse by Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour Party and the incumbent British prime minister. In this light, the article presents a quantitative study whose purpose is to identify, quantify, and discuss discourse markers (henceforth – DMs) in a corpus of speeches on climate change by Keir Starmer. The corpus is analysed in the computer program AntConc (Anthony, 2022) in order to compute the frequency of the occurrence of DMs. The results of the quantitative corpus analysis indicate that the most frequent DMs in the corpus are (i) and, (ii) as, (iii) but, (iv) also, (v) so, and (vi) because. The findings are further discussed and illustrated in the article.