A Framing Analysis On Chinese And American News Reports On "Trump's Withdrawal From Paris Agreement" From The Perspective Of Ecology

As the extended development of conceptual metaphor theory,Framing Theory is one of the new major results in cognitive science,which has strong illustration power to political discourse.The lexical items in discourse could activate surface frames,including metaphorical frames and non-metaphorical frames.And those conveyed values and underlying ideologies are called deep frames.As Ecolinguistics being an emerging field of linguistics,analyzing the political discourse from the perspective of ecology could explain and expose the hidden ecological issues and arouse the public's ecological awareness to take further actions to protect the environment.This thesis makes a comparative analysis of frames on American and Chinese news reports on "Trump's Withdrawal from Paris Agreement" from the perspective of ecology.The corpora are selected from relevant news reports in electronic versions of American and Chinese quality papers.The American corpus consists of 20 news reports from New York Times and Washington Post respectively,which contains 40 pieces of news reports in total,about 45000 words.The Chinese corpus also consists of 20 news reports from People 's Daily and Global Times respectively,containing 40 news reports in the whole,about 43000 characters.The comparison between these two corpora attempts to analyze the below three questions:(1)What are the dominant surface and deep frames in American and Chinese news reports on "Trump's Withdrawal from Paris Agreement"?(2)How are the classifications made on the deep frames identified in the news reports from the perspective of ecology?(3)What are the similarities and differences of surface and deep frames between Chinese and American news reports?Based on the Framing Theory and Ecolinguisctis,this thesis adopts the quantitative and qualitative methods to make a comparative study on the frames appeared in American and Chinese news reports to find out their similarities and differences.The conclusions are as follows:(1)Surface and deep frames are identified in both American and Chinese news reports on "Trump's Withdrawal from Paris Agreement".The surface frame consists of metaphorical and non-metaphorical frame.The main surface frames activated in American corpus include Journey Frame,War Frame,Up/Down Frame,Competition Frame.The deep frames identified in American corpus include Self-interest Frame,Strict Father Frame and Nurturant Parent Frame,and growthism.The main surface frames activated in Chinese corpus include Journey Frame,Stage Frame,Problem Frame,Cooperation Frame.The deep frames in Chinese corpus include growthism,Common-interest Frame and Peace and Harmony;(2)The core ecological viewpoint held by this thesis is "harmonious relationship between nature and human beings".Deep frame that supports this ecosophy is viewed as positive one,which could motivate people to support the ecosystem,including the Common-interest Frame and Peace and Harmony.Neutral deep frame refers to the frame which won't support or violate the ecosophy,exerting the neutral influence on the environment,including the Strict Father Frame and Nurturant Parent Frame.The negative deep frame is the frame violating the ecosophy,which will bring about bad results on the environment,including growthism and Self-interest Frame.(3)The similarities of these two corpora lie in the similar proportion of surface frames,while American news reports are more likely to use frames than Chinese news reports.Meanwhile,the positive deep frame of Chinese news reports takes up a larger proportion than that in American news reports,and the negative deep frame accounts for a smaller proportion than American news reports.The discrepancies can be attributed to the different core values and cultural diversity between America and China.In summary,the comparative analysis presents that different surface and deep frames can reflect and reinforce the underlying morality values of America and China.