Keywords

corpus linguistics, sustainability, content analysis, civil and construction engineering

Abstract

This research explores the historic use of the concept of sustainability in civil engineering academic literature and identifies its conceptual evolution and connotative treatment over the last 40 years. We find that academic research addressing sustainability is exponentially increasing and that the focus on sustainability is enlarging from a primarily environmental perspective to include more social elements. Additionally, we propose a set of six connotations of sustainability: assessment, progress, permanence, abstractness, multidimensional, and intersectional. These connotations provide conceptual clarity for academics and practitioners in better-defining sustainability objectives and measuring outcomes. These connotations also promote more efficient collaboration with other necessary disciplines in the pursuit of project and societal-level goals. The research employs a novel use of computational corpus linguistics in CCE to identify and examine patterns of collocates associated with the word sustainability in a corpus of 335,020 peer-reviewed civil and construction engineering (CCE) scholarly abstracts published between 1981 and 2021. Demonstrating this research method is a contribution to CCE researchers systematically extracting meaning from large volumes of literature.

Original Publication Citation

Wang, X., South, A., Hashimoto, B., & Farnsworth, C. (2024). Six connotations of ‘sustainability’ in civil and construction engineering: A corpus linguistics study. Sustainability, 16(15), 6271.

Document Type

Peer-Reviewed Article

Publication Date

2024-07-23

Publisher

Sustainability

Language

English

College

Humanities

Department

Linguistics

University Standing at Time of Publication

Assistant Professor

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