Six Connotations of Sustainability in Civil and Construction Engineering: A Corpus Linguistics Study

Xiaomei Wang (), Andrew South, Brett Hashimoto and Clifton Farnsworth
Additional contact information
Xiaomei Wang: Civil and Construction Engineering, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT 84602, USA
Andrew South: Civil and Construction Engineering, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT 84602, USA
Brett Hashimoto: Department of Linguistics, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT 84602, USA
Clifton Farnsworth: Civil and Construction Engineering, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT 84602, USA

Sustainability, 2024, vol. 16, issue 15, 1-18

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.

Keywords: corpus linguistics; sustainability; content analysis; civil and construction engineering (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/16/15/6271/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/16/15/6271/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:16:y:2024:i:15:p:6271-:d:1440555

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().