A Study Of English Environmental Reports From The Perspective Of Eco-critical Discourse Analysis

In recent years,with the continuous development of human society,humans have made rapid progress in science,technology and economy,but there are many negative problems: rapid population growth,environmental pollution,loss of biodiversity and extinction of rare biological species.The deterioration of the global ecological environment has aroused the widespread attention of the public and made people more and more yearn for a harmonious ecological environment.Scholars from different disciplines,experts on environmental issues,and sociologists are actively involved in dealing with the emerging environmental crises.Eco-linguistics is a new branch of linguistics formed by the combination of ecology and linguistics.Its task is to reveal the interaction between language and environment by analyzing and studying the ecological factors of language,and then hope to help solve the ecological environment problems from the language level.In this context,eco-critical discourse analysis,as the core theory of eco-linguistics,is used to reveal what is deeply embedded in linguistic choices and even hidden by linguistic choices.This thesis conducts an eco-critical discourse analysis of environmental news reports on whaling,which are selected from the authoritative news sites like the Los Angeles Times,VOA,CNN,the Guardian and the Telegraph.With Fairclough's three-dimensional analysis model as the framework and a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods are utilized.In the description stage,the linguistic features of the selected news are analyzed in details by applying transitivity system of systemic functional linguistics.In the stage of interpretation,it reveals the non-ecological grammars and the linguistic devices concealed in the transitivity processes.While in the stage of explanation,it mainly involves the interrelationship between linguistic choices and ecological civilization.This study answers three questions:(i)What transitivity resources are employed in English environmental news reports on whaling?(ii)What non-ecological grammar and linguistic devices are concealed in the environmental news reports?(iii)What is the bidirectional relationship between linguistic choices and ecological civilization in these English environmental news reports?The results of this study are as follows: first of all,the analysis of the selected news from the perspective of transitivity system shows that there are six transitivity processes in the texts.The material process,the relational process and the verbal process are used more frequently,in which the proportion of the material process is more than half of all,accounting for 59.0 percent,while the proportion of the relational process is 20.2 percent.Verbal process accounts for 13.6 percent of all.The other three process types are mental process,existential process and behavioral process.Mental process accounts for 4.4 percent,and existential process accounts for 2.5 percent,while behavioral process accounts for the lowest of all process types,accounting for only 0.3 percent.Secondly,at interpretation stage,it can be found that through the utilization of nominalization,noun phrases,metonymy and collective nouns,there are some non-ecological grammatical thoughts hidden in the material process,relational process,verbal process,and existential process.Finally,the bidirectional relationship between linguistic choices and ecological civilization is revealed in the explanation stage,that is,the state of ecological civilization determines the choice of language,and the choice of language will affect the construction of ecological civilization.This research has certain theoretical and practical significance.First,it helps to enrich the research scope of eco-linguistics and promote the development of eco-linguistics.Secondly,this study can help people to pay more attention to environmental problems and improve environmental awareness,which is expected to find a possible way to solve the ecological environment problems from the language level.This thesis is intended to help readers develop a sense of critical thinking.