ELSEVIER Journal of Pragmatics 28 (1997) 249-251 Discussion A response to Schleppegrell: What makes a grammar green? Andrew Goatly National Institute of Education, Nanyan~ Technologieal University. 469 Bukit Timah Road. Singapore 259756, Republic qf Singapore Received January 1997 This is a response to Mary Schleppegrell's reply (in this volume) to my original article 'Green grammar and grammatical metaphor' in Journal of Pragmatics (1996). Schleppegrell's reply shows a good deal of common sense. If we are to help pupils in the early years of their education understand ecological problems (I avoid the word environmental since it belongs to the metaphor IMPORTANT = CEN- TRAL, presumably with the human race at the centre), then we ought to take pains to make sure what is written is comprehensible. However, my original article was not written with such children in mind, but with educated adults in mind, probably those with some interest in linguistics/the philosophy of language. In many ways I am quite sympathetic towards the existing practice in envi- ronmental critical linguistics which takes the construction of the world inherited from English/Indo-European grammar, and attempts to show how such features as nominalization can obscure agency and avoid apportioning responsibility for ecologically threatening practices. For example, I recently analyzed 'A new era unfolds' by Lester R. Brown, tile first chapter of State of the World (1993), pub- lished by The Worldwatch Institute (Norton: New York). This analysis of an avowedly ecologically crusading text bears out what Schleppegrell claims, that much of the time with nominalizations, non-specific humans are inferred as the agents of natural destruction. In the whole chapter there were only two cases where the agents were mentioned, and even then no particular companies were named: Overfishing of the North Atlantic by US, Canadian and European fleets. Japanese and Korean logging finns move into Siberia. 0378-2166/97/$17.00 © 1997 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved PII S0378-2166(97)00025-8