Eco-documentary is a media genre that aims to raise environmental awareness among the general public. It exposes environmental degradations and presents alternatives for environmental issues such as pollution, global warming, and deforestation among others. For this aim, the language of scientific experts contributes a lot to the making of the argumentative flow of the documentary. Within the framework of ecolinguistics, this article examines fear and threat expressions used by scientists to reinforce argumentation in Faouzi’s (2012) entitled /الزرقاء المرجة انين: Whining of the Blue Lagoon/. In this direction, Witte, Cameron, McKeon, & Berkowitz's (1996) model of "perceived severity" and "perceived susceptibility" was adopted to explain the use of fear and threat appeals in the film. The results show that ‘perceived severity’ and ‘perceived susceptibility’ expressions are preponderant in experts’ discourse. This study has many implications for eco-documentary producers, governmental and non-governmental organs, and future research in Morocco to explore other facets of films that report about man’s damages perpetrated to environmental settings and resources.

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Documentary films, generally of short or medium-length, have informative and educational purposes. They present authentic reports on areas of life, human activities, and the natural world. Particularly, eco-documentaries aim to raise environmental awareness towards the degradation of natural elements; they present alternatives for environmental issues such as pollution, global warming, and deforestation. To reinforce the argumentative process of environmental documentaries, laymen discourse contributes a lot to the meaning-making of productions. Within the framework of discourse analysis and ecolinguistics, this work examines fear and threat expressions used by ordinary witnesses to reinforce argumentation in Lahoucine Faouzi’s eco-documentary entitled “Whining of the Blue Lagoon. In this vein, the ‘perceived severity and perceived susceptibility’ model was used to investigate the implication of fear and threat appeals in laymen’s testimonies. The results show that these expressions are common among laymen’s narratives. This study has many implications for eco-documentary makers, governmental and non-governmental organs, and future research to explore other linguistic features in eco-documentaries on man’s perpetrated damages to the environmental resources.

In Morocco, public service announcement is a complex field in which various linguistic practices and semiotic representations collide. Hence, the aim of the present work is to demystify the misalignment between language and visuals in the public service announcement in a video on the protection of the environment, namely towards forests. This study adopts a discourse and a visual analysis to clarify the extent to which the interpretation of the announcement leas to misunderstanding and causes a lot of ambiguity. The study also shows that the trees and forests are linguistically reported as feminine constructs while the visuals portrayed them as masculine constructs. This article has a lot of implications for public institutions, advertising companies, and future researchers whose efforts are required to reconsider the pendulum between the linguistic and the visual in public announcements so as to effectively raise people’s awareness towards environmental issues.