Education for sustainable development: from codified interpretation to discursive representation (based on materials from the General Regional Annotated Corpus (GRAC))

Abstract

The present paper aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of the semantic transformations within the target phrases sustainable development / education for sustainable development, and to elucidate the specificities of their interpretation within both the lexical register and discourse. The review of theoretical literature and source base made it possible to construct lexical-semantic fields of the phrases sustainable development and education for sustainable development, to demonstrate their semantic overlap, linguistic reflection of the idea of the transformation in the speakers' minds and interpreted driven by essential objective / subjective intra- and extra lingual factors. To achieve the defines goal, general scientific and linguistic research methods were applied. Primarily, the method of definitional semantic analysis was applied to examine and elucidate the structure, content, and logic of the dictionary definitions for the concepts under consideration. The corpus-based methodology enabled the tracking of usage frequencies and dynamics of the phrase’s sustainable development and education for sustainable development in discursive content. Semantic-distributive analysis made it possible to analyze the specificity and variation of the contextual compatibility of the considered lexeme from a different perspective, as well as to construct a lexical-semantic field. The results illustrate the emergence of new semiotics, layered and usual, and therefore semantic modifications caused by extralinguistic factors. The outcomes of the research convince us that the understanding of the concept of sustainable development and education for sustainable development does not contradict the codified one. The first nomination is defined with a primary focus on sustainable growth, continuous improvement, and evolution, particularly within the educational sector. The identified semеs denote constancy, stability, immutability of something. Education for sustainable development is a specific trajectory of movement aimed at implementing the principles and axiological dominants of sustainable development in the educational process. Semantic-distributive analysis, an appeal to the linguistic corpus GRAK-19 helped reveal and identify additional seven explicated in the discursive content. In the considered discursive fragments (samples of the linguistic corpus GRAK-19) the word combinations sustainable development / education for sustainable outlined the features of vectors and approaches to attaining sustainable development, outlining goals, building algorithms and mechanisms for its achievement and adapting the educational sector to its core goals, aimed at constant improvement, perfection and growth.