Ecological Discourse Analysis Of Identity Construction On Sino-Us Energy Companies

The rapid development of economy and society has caused a serious impact on the ecological environment,which has attracted the attention of scholars from various fields,including linguists.As an official document for enterprises to disclose their corporate responsibilities,the corporate sustainable development report is an important carrier to display the enterprise’s ecological ideas.The energy industry is an environmentally sensitive field,and the research on its sustainable development report is more representative.Therefore,based on Stibbe’s(2015)Ecological Discourse Analysis framework,this study takes attitudinal resources as the research object to compare Chinese and American energy companies’ sustainable development reports,aiming to find out their similarities and differences in the use of attitudinal resources and to discuss and analyze these similarities and differences.Based on the Fortune rankings in 2022,this study collected sustainable development reports issued by Chinese and American energy companies in 2018-2020 and accordingly established two comparative corpora.After manual annotation,corpus concordance and statistical analysis,data description and inference were implemented,and the employment of attitudinal resources,the corporate identity,and the ecological stories revealed are discussed and analyzed respectively.Results show that there are both similarities and differences in terms of attitudinal resources’ quantitative distribution and using tendency in sustainable development reports of Chinese and American energy enterprises.In terms of quantitative distribution,the total quantity and distribution of the three types of attitudinal resources are different in the two corpora;however,both use judgment resources most,followed by appreciation resources,and use affect resources least.In terms of using tendency,there is an opposite tendency between Chinese and American energy companies in choosing sub-categories of affect,judgement,and appreciation resources.Research suggests that,firstly,Chinese and American energy companies constructed different corporate identities with the help of attitudinal resources.Chinese energy companies construct their corporate identity as clean energy developers and environmental regulation supporters and followers,showing the firm,ethical,green,and responsible identity characteristics;American energy enterprises,on the other hand,constructed their corporate identities as biodiversity practitioners and natural resource managers,showing self-confidence,honesty,reliability,and competence.Secondly,four ecological stories were revealed in the process of identity construction.They are energy story,climate change story,water resource story and biodiversity story.According to the ecosophy,four stories revealed by Chinese energy companies are all beneficial discourse,which are worth promoting;while the energy story and water management story revealed by American energy companies are ambivalent discourses,and the climate change story is destructive discourse,in which the linguistic pattern should be improved to convey conducive ecological value.All in all,this study provides an EDA explanation for the linguistic research on corporate sustainable development reports,which has both theoretical and practical significance.Theoretically,this study integrates the attitude system of Appraisal Theory with EDA framework,which broadens their application ascopes and further enriches their theoretical connotation.Practically,this study explores the ecological values reflected in the sustainable development reports of Chinese and American energy companies and reveals the ecological discourse type,which is helpful for enterprises to write sustainable development reports;and it helps readers to cultivate critical attitude towards corporate SDRs.