| April 13,2021,Japanese government held a cabinet meeting to announce their final decision of dumping the contaminated radioactive wastewater in Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant into the Pacific Ocean.This decision was instantly greeted with an avalanche of publicity with many media actively following this event.The relevant news reports thus became a research object worthy of ecological discourse analysis.Previous studies on environmental protection news discourses have mainly focused on climate change,global warming,meteorological phenomena,etc.,while studies on environmental news discourse of marine ecology are lesser than few.Therefore,this thesis adopts both quantitative and qualitative methods to compare and analyze Chinese,and American news reports on Japan’s discharge of radioactive wastewater from the perspective of ecological discourse analysis.The texts used for this study are 44 news reports(20,128 words)published on People’s Daily Online and U.S.News&World Report dated from April 9,2021 to December 31,2021.All the texts are annotated manually based on the theoretical framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics with the help of UAM Corpus Tool 3.3x and WordSmith 6.0.The collected data are then used for comparative analysis from the perspective of ecological discourse analysis regarding transitivity and thematic structure,aiming to explore and reveal the ideologies between the lines and the ecosophies implication in the discourses.As far as transitivity is concerned,material process,relational process and verbal process are analyzed in detail.The analysis shows that when using material processes,U.S.News&World Report is prone to employing inanimate entities representing groups as actors,distributing responsibility to each individual within the group to hide the real decision makers.Besides,by using nominalization and passive voice to make the concrete acts abstract,the verbs in the main clauses are loosely related to the agents,making it difficult for the readers to make direct connections between the Japanese government and the radioactive wastewater discharging issue.For the meantime,the U.S.media tends to downgrade the hazards of nuclear wastewater by using words such as "water"rather than"wastewater" to lessen the serious intensity impact of the information to reader’s perception with regards to the matter.In terms of verbal processes,U.S.News&World Report relatively uses more reported speeches,which may cause possible further exaggeration or modification that alters the original quotation and distorts reality in its favor.In addition,U.S.News&World Report uses relational linguistics instead of the more expressive terminologies to reduce potency of wastewater discharge,diverting attentions from the feasibility of the discharging issue,and its destructive marine ecological impact into the matter of Japan’s implementation instead,showing support and tacit approval over Japan’s decision.On the contrary,People’s Daily Online publication tends to use verbs and active voice more often in material process to emphasize the action per se.,and the Chinese government and relevant agencies serves as the agents to call for Japan to reconsider its decision.Moreover,it uses relatively more quoted speeches in verbal processes with specific information sources,quoting persons’ names and their titles,etc.to attract public attention and ensure the objectivity and authority of the reports.People’s Daily Online would also express its condemnation and discontent of Japan’s disregard for marine ecology through relational and verbal processes.Thematic analysis is conducted mainly with regard to the markedness of themes.In terms of the unmarked theme,the results show that when describing the responses of Japan’s neighboring countries,U.S.News&World Report tries to steer clear the words related to conflicts,describing the issue in a plain and moderate manner to report the others’oppositions and tone down the hazards of wastewater.Besides,incorporating extra entity other than Japan into the unmarked theme is a strategy that U.S.media is employing to distract the audience from Japan’s irresponsibility.More often than not,"Fukushima"rather than"Japan" would play the role of unmarked theme in U.S.News&World Report,acting as the scapegoat of Japan diverting public attention so that the Japanese side does’t have to face too much public outcry.On the other hand,out of the consideration of being responsible for its own people and ecological environment,People’s Daily Online often places "Japan" and its decision in the relatively prominent position of unmarked theme,and the dissenting voices of Japan’s decision(oppositions,concerns,etc.)also make frequent appearances with a hope to arouse people’s attention on the consequence of Japan’s irresponsible behavior.In terms of the marked theme,complements,unlike in most cases,are frequently employed as the marked theme in the two groups of texts due to the extensive quotations in news reporting,and adjuncts indicating time and dependent clauses like the clauses of concession that often highlights an emphasis on the proposition ensued which often represents both side’s opinion.Chinese media would take advantage of that and express discontents and condemnations over Japan’s decisions on the subject theme and rheme,but its American counterpart tends to protect its ally by downplaying the seriousness of the event in this part and paradoxically stressing the bright side of Japan’s action in the marked theme,acting nonchalantly to other affected countries and their people as a bystander,and the potential consequences and hazards of nuclear wastewater discharge are rarely mentioned.Through the analyses of transitivity and thematic structure,the following conclusions are drawn.On one hand,the description in People’s Daily Online reflects the harmonious ecosophy of "people-orientedness",indicating that China is trying to strike a balance between natural ecology and social ecology while repeatedly pointing out that the Japanese government,the subject of responsibility for this incident,has put its neighboring countries and the marine ecology at great risk.U.S.News&World Report,on the other hand,tries to politicize this issue,characterizing the nuclear wastewater,a major threat to the ocean and the entire marine ecology,as a less harmful and regular matter.It attempts to shift or hide Japan,the real perpetrator,by means of different transitivity processes and thematic structures to divert public attention and dilute excessive public criticism on the Japanese side.U.S.News&World Report’s focus on how to protect America’s ally rather than how to protect the oceans reflects its fixed mentality of prioritizing politics in the face of ecological crisis.This study enriches the research of news discourse on marine ecology from the perspective of ecological discourse analysis,pointing out that news reports can convey to readers the ideology represented by the media in explicit or implicit ways,which is enlightening in revealing the ideological representations in the discourse.This thesis aims to help readers develop their critical thinking skills and establish a correct set of values so that they can understand and appreciate news discourses in a prudent and critical manner. |
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