An Eco-oriented Analysis Of Multimodality

The deterioration of the ecosystem has spurred scholastic studies from the perspective of ecology.As a result,there is an ecological turn in the academia with ecolinguistics being an emerging discipline.Meanwhile,pro-environmental Public Service Advertising(PSA)plays an important role in raising public awareness of ecological protection and changing their attitudes and behavior regarding ecological problems.Hence,it is of practical significance to study pro-environmental PSA from the perspective of ecolinguistics.Following Stibbe’s(2015)approach to ecolinguistics,the thesis designs an analytical framework that combines the metafunction theory of Systemic Functional Linguistics,Visual Grammar and Ecosophy of Socialist Ecological Civilization(ESEC)to analyze the pro-environmental PSAs from the National Excellent Television and Broadcasting Public Service Advertising Collection on the CCTV website.The thesis aims to achieve three objectives:(1)to construct an analytical framework for eco-oriented multimodal discourse analysis within Chinese context;(2)to reveal the ideologies and judge them according to ESEC by analyzing the language and visual patterns in the corpus;(3)to summarize the language and visual patterns that convey ESEC and to provide suggestions on addressing those that work against ESEC.Conclusions are drawn as follows:1.Generally speaking,pro-environmental PSAs from the CCTV website could be categorized as eco-ambivalent discourses.They contain ideologies aligning with ESEC,i.e.man and nature constitute a life community and man must respect the law of nature.They also contain the ideology that works against ESEC,i.e.man is the master of nature.2.The language and visual patterns that construct ESEC are summarized as follows: ideational function plays a decisive role in conveying ESEC;“human being”is employed as the main participant role to stress man’s responsibility;high value modality is adopted to convey ESEC;there is high frequency of the occurrence of non-human organisms in visual images,conveying equality between man and nature;Linguistic and visual modes work in a non-reinforcement complementary pattern,cooperating with each other to communicate eco-beneficial information and stir audience’s emotions simultaneously.3.Suggestions are made to address the language and visual patterns that work against ESEC: the proportion of non-human organisms as the main participant role could be increased to stress unity between man and nature;more process types in linguistic system could be employed for different functions;more eye contacts are advised to resonate with viewers.