| In recent years,human beings’ unreasonable exploitation and utilization of natural resources have led to the loss of ecological balance.With the frequent occurrence of ecological crises worldwide,maintaining ecological balance has become a consensus among human beings.In this context,ecolinguistics came into being and developed rapidly,gradually becoming a research hotspot in the field of linguistics.Ecological discourse analysis is an important research paradigm in ecolinguistics,which focuses on revealing the vital role of language in maintaining ecological balance from the perspective of linguistics.News,as a typical information medium,conveys views and positions that have a subtle influence on readers’ thought and behavior.Therefore,it is necessary to pay attention to whether the discourse conveyed by the news is ecologically beneficial.Under the guidance of attitude system in appraisal theory and the ecosophy of“Living!”,this study conducts an ecological discourse analysis of attitudinal resources employed in animal protection news,aiming to explore the distributions,features and ecological attributes of attitudinal resources in the news.The research object of this study is 35 pieces of news reports selected from the official website of World Animal Protection(www.worldanimalprotection.org),with about 20,000 words in total.With the assistance of the UAMcorpus Tool 3.3,attitudinal resources in the news are exhaustively annotated.Based on quantitative and qualitative research methods,this study will answer the following three research questions.(1)Distributions and realizations of the attitudinal resources employed in animal protection news.(2)Features of the attitudinal resources employed in animal protection news.(3)Ecological attributes of the attitudinal resources employed in animal protection news.Through the analysis of attitudinal resources in the news,we can get the following findings:(1)Attitudinal resources are largely used in animal protection news,and the three sub-categories of attitude system,namely affect,judgment and appreciation,are all presented in the news.Among them,judgement resources are most frequently used,with the number of 422,occupying 51.84%.Next,the occurrence number of appreciation resources is 212,accounting for 26.04%.Affect resources appear least frequently,with the number of 180,accounting for 22.11%.(2)Attitudinal resources in animal protection news show two distinct features,namely polarity and explicitness.In terms of polarity,the frequency of positive resources in animal protection news far exceed that of negative resources.It is found that animal protection news tends to use positive resources to evaluate animal protection behavior and negative resources to evaluate animal abuse.In terms of the feature of explicitness,animal protection news can be found to convey attitudes toward animal protection and animal cruelty through direct or indirect linguistic resources.(3)As for ecological attributes,news reporters of animal protection news evaluate ecological subjects through attitudinal resources to construct a discourse that is beneficial to the cultivation of ecological consciousness;the study also found that the proportion of eco-beneficial resources in the news is much higher than that of eco-ambivalent and eco-destructive resources.Therefore,the news selected are generally conducive to the improvement of readers’ ecological consciousness.The significance of this study lies in that it further confirms the applicability of attitude system in ecological discourse analysis and enriches the research perspective of animal protection news.At the same time,it is of significance in guiding news reporters and readers to pay attention to animal protection and the importance of news discourse in spreading ecological ideas. |
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