An Eco-critical Discourse Analysis Of Environmental News Reports

As our country devotes great efforts to developing green economy,environmental protection has become increasingly important in people’s life.Guizhou province,which was formerly labeled in news reports as a “poor and underdeveloped western region”but is now widely praised for its unique climate conditions and abundant natural resources,has become a national model province of ecological protection.It is thus of practical significance to study Guizhou environmental news reports which can reflect local ecological civilization construction process.In this context,this thesis integrates Halliday’s transitivity system and Fairclough’s three-dimensional analytical model of critical discourse analysis as the theoretical framework,and conducts an eco-critical discourse analysis of sample environmental news reports in Guizhou Daily from 1999 to 2018.It tries to reveal the non-ecological language use and its embodied anthropocentrism and growthism in news discourse,and to help readers understand the relationship between ecological discourse,environment and society,with an aim to improve people’s ecological awareness.The research questions include:(1)What are the distributional patterns of transitivity system in the corpus?(2)How are ecological characteristics and ecological awareness represented via the transitivity system in the sample environmental news reports?(3)How to use language to improve people’s ecological awareness and construct a harmonious ecological society?In this thesis,279 articles on the topics of green,ecological construction or environmental protection from the December issue of Guizhou Daily between 1999 and2018 were collected to build the corpus,and 20 news reports describing local environmental conditions were selected from each year for sample analysis.The analysis process of this thesis corresponds to the three stages of description,interpretation and explanation of three-dimensional model.Firstly,it describes the distribution patterns of transitivity process types in corpus from the text dimension,then interprets the ideologies represented via the transitivity system from the dimension of discursive practice,and finally explores the relationship between environmental news reports and social context from the dimension of social practice.Through the analysis of the corpus,we can get the following findings:(1)The six process types of transitivity system are identified in the corpus and the material process accounts for more than half of the total transitivity resources,while the behavioral process has the lowest proportion.By comparing the 14 main participants in six process types,we find that participant people has the highest frequency of occurrence,followed by government and environment.(2)The ideologies represented via the transitivity system include the backward thoughts of anthropocentrism and growthism in the past,and the current environmental protection awareness,which reflects the reconstruction of people’s ideology from the dimension of discursive practice.(3)There is a close relationship between environmental news reports and its social context,and positive environmental news discourse can help to promote the spread of green development concepts,improve people’s ecological awareness and accelerate the construction of a harmonious ecological society.Although eco-critical discourse analysis has drawn much attention in previous researches,studies that reflect the development of environmental governance in a certain province of China are still limited.In line with the country’s requirement for promoting the construction of ecological civilization,this thesis is expected not only to reveal the unecological factors and unecological ideologies in language use,learn about the progress in ecological protection in Guizhou province over the past 20 years from the perspective of ecolinguistics,but also to sound the alarm for China’s environmental protection and then provide suggestions to establish an ecologically harmonious society.With regard to the theoretical value,this thesis combines critical discourse analysis,ecological discourse analysis as well as transitivity system for case analysis,which complements domestic studies in this field and further proves the feasibility of applying transitivity system and the three-dimensional model to ecological discourse analysis.