| The thesis conducts an ecocritical discourse analysis research on 50 pieces of news reports on animal protection from the website(https://www.worldanimalprotection.org)by applying Halliday's functional grammar and Fairclough's three-dimensional model.Both the quantitative and qualitative research methods are employed to analyze the lexico-grammatical features of transitivity,transformation and modality in the selected news reports on animal protection,exposing and criticizing the hidden ideology of anthropocentrism as well as searching and exploring the “ecocentrism” thought in the news reports so as to achieve the effect of interaction between language,ecological environment and society.Based on Fairclough's three-dimensional model,some major findings can be presented through detailed analysis.In the description stage,linguistic features of the transitivity,transformation and modality in the selected news reports are found and described,which reveals humans' domination over animals.Concerning transitivity,all the six processes in the news reports imply the idea of anthropocentrism,but some clauses in material and mental processes embody the idea of “ecocentrism”.As for transformation,the massive use of nominalization and passive voice cleverly conceal the agent of the event,which is also a reflection of "anthropocentrism".Whereas,there are still some agents mentioned in the passive voice,which embodies the journalists' ecological consciousness of protecting the animals.The analysis of modality shows that the modal operator “should” indicates journalists' incomplete ecological spirit,while other modal verbs and modal adverbs all embody the idea of “anthropocentrism” in various degrees.In the interpretation stage,the author of the present research exposes the ecological relationships between humans,animals and the nature reflected by the lexico-grammatical features of transitivity,transformation,and modality in the news reports.The majority of human agents in transitivity system,the unbalanced distribution of the different modal verbs used in the selected reports best reflect the status inequalities,through which humans' domination towards the animals is completely exposed.So their relationship can be generalized as “dominating-dominated.” That is to say,language used in the selected reports is an important tool to affect the potential readers' ideologies for their own purposes.Though the reporters of the selected news reports urged people to protect animals,yet their deep-rooted sense of human domination is still unconsciously revealed by the language they used.In the explanation stage,the present author emphasizes that the hidden ideologies of anthropocentrism and ecocentrism exposed under the superficial theme of protecting animals is inseparable with the reporters' social context that they live in.That is to say,the social determinants on the selected news reports and its constructive influence on discourse in society are explained in this part.The ideological effects on society could enlighten the reporters to use more ecological language patterns to report the news.Meanwhile,readers should enhance their sensitivity to the ideology contained in language and be critical when reading ecological news reports like this.Thus joint efforts should be made to build an ecological civilization. |
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