Discourse on Complexity: Can Ecolinguistics Contribute to the Development of More Equitable and Sustainable Economic Models?

This study examines how language shapes competing economic paradigms by comparing traditional economic discourse with emergent complexity‑oriented narratives through Corpus‑assisted Ecolinguistics. Using a purpose‑built Economic Complexity Corpus (ECC) extracted from the CORE repository (2019-2024) and a set of ELSERVIER economic discourse subcorpora (ELSC), we combine quantitative analysis with Sketch Engine (by generating frequency lists, LogDice collocates, and multi‑word keywords) with qualitative concordance inspection and semantic annotation. The aim is to identify meaningful linguistic patterns across corpora, examining how language use reflects and shapes specialists’ and public perceptions of sustainability and economic practices. Corpus comparison shows a clear discursive split: ECC foregrounds (eco)systemic vocabulary—complexity, innovation, green growth, emissions and equity—while ELSC emphasizes metric‑centered frames (GDP, productivity, price, household) that treat socio‑environmental issues transactionally. Collocational and prosodic evidence reveals that identical lemmas and premodifiers (e.g., growth, product, natural, green) carry different evaluative orientations across corpora, with ECC linking complexity to reduced inequality, sophisticated knowledge and better environmental performance and ELSC often treating ecological issues as economic opportunities or constraints on growth. These findings suggest a critical need for economic narratives to evolve towards more holistic models that prioritize well-being over mere economic expansion and that test the effectiveness of economic measures by considering value and progress not only associated with economic attributes but with sustainable provision of renewable resources, shelter, and education in the long-term. By fostering awareness of linguistic framing of economic issues, this research urges for a paradigmatic shift aligning the economic thought with ecological interdependence. Future studies should examine how public and digital media discourses adopt or resist these models, enhancing understanding of sustainability within complex adaptive systems.