Exploring the Future in Climate Change Non-Fiction. A Linguistic Perspective

The article examines how the future is represented in climate change non-fiction, arguing that this often-underestimated genre shapes influential socio-environmental imaginaries. It maintains that such writing casts the future as a contested rhetorical and cultural space structured by expectations, imaginaries, and socio-political narratives. Drawing on corpus-assisted discourse studies from an interdisciplinary perspective, it analyses a corpus of 23 English-language books published from the 1960s to the present, highlighting the value of non-fiction as a site for examining climate discourse through time and space. It examines orientations toward the future using qualitative and quantitative methods, focusing on their linguistic realizations and distribution across three historical periods. Informed by anthropological work, it identifies anticipation, speculation, expectation, and potentiality as central discursive patterns and traces how these orientations evolve over time, distinguishing broader temporal trends from author-specific variation. It also considers the linguistic and discursive cues that signal such orientations and highlights the heterogeneity of the corpus, showing how linguistic resources are deployed differently according to distinct epistemic and cultural investments. The study concludes that climate change non-fiction constructs the future as a site of discursive struggle, shaping patterns of public engagement and ways of thinking about climate futures.