An International Ecological Discourse Analysis Of The United Nations’ Speeches On Marine Protection

The marine ecological environment issues are not only closely related to social development issues,but also the concern of Linguistics.As one of the main types of ecological speeches,marine protection speeches’ ecological figure is relatively typical.In addition,the existing studies mainly focus on the translation,outreach strategies and discourse representation of marine conservation speeches but lack of research on their ecological figures.International Ecological Discourse Analysis(IEDA)refers to the study of relationship between nations reflected in the discourse by Ecological Discourse Analysis(CDA),aiming to reveal the ecological meaning conveyed by discourse.This research taking the United Nations’ marine protection speeches as the research object,referring to the Systemic Functional Framework of IEDA,analyzed the ecological features of international discourse,respectively from the perspectives of experiential meaning,interpersonal meaning,textual meaning,and explain the ecological meaning of the discourse,and uncovered and judged the ecological ideology.Firstly,the corpus with “marine” and “ocean” as the theme and “speech” as the genre was extracted from the official website of the United Nations.Power GREP was used to delete the information irrelevant to the theme in batches,and Duplicate Cleaner was used to remove the information repeatedly.Finally,a “the United Nations’ Speeches on Marine Protection” corpus was constructed which includes 25 speeches,18963 characters.On the basis of IEDA theories and approaches,this study analyzed “the United Nations’ Speeches on Marine Protection” corpus by employing the UAM Corpus Tool.The main findings of the study are as follows:Firstly,in terms of ecologicalized experiential meaning,the social participants are more than the physical participants,and the human participants are far more than the non-human participants.It shows that the United Nations stands for “human-oriented” and pays attention to the sustainable development of human society.And the material process and relational process are the main lexical resources;the beneficial process accounts for the highest proportion,which indicates that the United Nations’ marine protection speeches express beneficial experiential meaning,follow the “diversity and harmony,interaction and existence”international ecosophy,and belong to useful international ecological discourse.Secondly,in terms of ecologicalized interpersonal significance,the United Nations’ marine protection discourse reflects beneficial interpersonal experience.Among them,the the indicative mood is the mainly mood type,while the quantity of interrogative mood and imperative mood is small,which indicates that the speaker mainly aims to provide information and suggestions,and has a high discourse status.Speakers are identified as“human individual speakers” and listeners as “human group listeners” participating in the beneficial interactions of the international ecological factor system;In terms of modality,speakers mainly use modal verbs expressing probabilistic and obligatory meanings,and choose different values according to the context.They mainly use medium value modality words such as “will” to express probabilistic meanings,high value modality words such as“must” and “have to” to express obligatory meanings,and low value modality words to express desiderative meanings.This kind of word choice conveys the interpersonal meaning of harmony and tolerance on the one hand,making the speeches more easily accepted by the audience,on the other hand,which shows that the United Nations’ marine speeches bring the speakers and the audience to the ecological responsibility of marine protection,focusing on constructing beneficial ecological relationships between human and the oceans on the international ecological system;In terms of attitude resources,the number of beneficial attitude resources was the largest,indicating that the speakers expressed positive evaluation attitudes towards marine events and related participants,which is an ecologically beneficial attitude and conducive to promoting the benign development of the international ecosystem.Thirdly,in terms of ecologicalized textual meaning,the choices of the thematic participant are significantly diverse,which indicates that the speech discourses have strong ecological features.The number of beneficial interpersonal themes is the largest,indicating that the speakers use beneficial interpersonal thematic resources to construct a benign ecological relationship with the audience and express positive ecological evaluation.With the self-built “The United Nation’s marine protection speeches” corpus,this research systematically investigates the discursive features of the ecologicalized experiential meaning,the ecologicalized interpersonal meaning,as well as the ecologicalized textual meaning,the ecological meaning and the ecological ideologies by the employment of theories and approaches of IEDA,which offers a new analytical angle of marine protection speeches and develops the research on IEDA.