A Comparative Study Of Chinese And Foreign Environmental Discourses From The Perspective Of Proximization Theory

As our country devotes great efforts to developing a green economy,environmental protection has become increasingly prominent in people’s daily lives.As a media discourse,news reports convey various objective facts to the public,guiding readers’ behavioral judgments through implicit values and ideologies.Critical discourse analysis believes that language is not neutral but a highly constructive medium.News discourse ubiquitously uses the inherent productive function of language to construct a social validity that is beneficial to its side,revealing how a specific group can directly or indirectly convey the ideology that conforms to their groups’ interests.Thereby,this research chooses Chinese and Western media news reports on China’s environmental pollution to do the critical discourse analysis.This study adopts the proximization theory proposed by Cap and the SpatialTemporal-Axiological model as the analysis framework to form a qualitative analysis frame.Besides,it selects 57 Western news reports and 86 Chinese news reports from the official websites of mainstream Chinese and Western media with 60,435 words,making up two self-built small corpora as the basis of quantitative analysis.Therefore,a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods in this study is used to collect the lexical-grammatical items and lexical frequency under the Spatial-TemporalAxiological model framework.In addition,this thesis aims at studying the following two research questions with specific example sentences:(1)What language expressions did the Chinese and Western media use to construct their spatial,temporal,and axiological proximization in reporting on China’s environmental pollution? What kind of ideology behind Chinese and Western news discourses is revealed via these language expressions?(2)What are the differences in proximization categories and frequency of proximization strategies adopted by different media in a report of China’s environmental pollution? How to explain the relationship between these differences and the ideology hidden behind the discourses?This thesis found in spatial proximization,the Chinese news reports divided the outside deictic center members in detail,highlighting the potential threat from them is approaching inside deictic centers in many aspects.In contrast,Western news reports focused on describing the current harm that the outside deictic center has caused to the inside deictic center to arouse public awareness of China’s severe environmental pollution.It strictly reveals the western media’s potential doubts and deep mistrust of China’s environmental governance capabilities.In the second place,in terms of temporal proximization,both Chinese and Western media focus on the contrastive use of the simple past and the present perfect tense,construing the threatening future extending infinitely from a past instant.The threat of outside deictic center is continuously invading the speaker or the listener’s physical domain,then the actions and policies proposed by the speaker get their legitimization naturally.Finally,in the axiological proximization strategy,the Chinese media intends to establish a positive image of maintaining the speaker’s status.What is more,it regards economic development as the negative value of outside deictic center to express its determination to win the environmental improvement and awaken people’s ecological awareness.At the same time,Western media pays more attention to the construction of outside deictic center’s negative value,aiming to accuse China’s poor environmental governance and endow it with legitimacy to criticize the Chinese government.Under the spatial-temporal-axiological model,Chinese news reports adopt spatial and axiological proximization strategies more frequently among the three approaches,profiling the gradual invasion of the outside deictic center to the inside deictic center.In that way,Chinese news aim at arousing the listeners’ awareness that the external threats are approaching the listener’s physical area to reach the legalization of the policy or action proposed by the speaker.The Chinese media intends to build a positive image of themselves through axiological strategies to gain the trust of the people and express the government’s determination and confidence in environmental protection.Among the three proximization strategies,western news reports always use the combination of spatial proximization and temporal proximization.In addition,Western media reports point out that Chinese economic development has caused indelible damage to the environment in the past few decades.These effects continue from the past to the present.Moreover,at the axiological proximization,western news reports emphasize the harm of outside deictic centers on people’s physical and mental health to accuse the Chinese government of bad environmental governance,showing their discredit upon China’s rapid economic development.From the theoretical aspect,this research interprets the explanatory power of the proximization theory and enriches the domestic research methods on environmental news discourse.What is more,the corpus linguistics method makes up for the previous studies,which are short of quantitative research.From the practical aspect,this thesis compares the different proximization strategies adopted in Chinese and western news under the spatial-temporal-axiological framework,aiming at revealing the ideology hidden behind environmental news discourse.Then this thesis helps readers recognize the real intentions embedded in western news and finally achieves a rational interpretation of public discourse.