An Ecological Discourse Analysis Of Jack London’s Novels

In recent years,faced the increasingly severe global ecological problems,linguists begin to pay attention to ecological problems from the perspective of ecolinguistics.Ecological Discourse Analysis,as one of the main research methods of ecolinguistics,can study the relationship between language and ecology and reveal ecological consciousness behind language.Transitivity system,as a related theory of linguistics,can explore the ecological thought of discourse concretely and visually.Jack London as a famous American realist writer whose literary works are abundant and widely spread.The Call of the Wild is one of his most representative works.At present,scholars mainly analyze the novel from the perspective of literary criticism,and there are few studies on it from the perspective of transitivity system.Based on the transitivity system,this thesis combines the views of ecosophy to make an Ecological Discourse Analysis of Jack London’s classic literary work The Call of the Wild,aiming to explore the ecological thought in it.With the help of UAM corpus tool 3.3,this thesis makes a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the literary work to study the following three questions:(1)How are the transitivity processes distributed in The Call of the Wild?(2)What ecological relationships does the distribution of transitivity processes reflect between humans and non-human creatures,between non-human creatures,and between humans?(3)What ecological thought do the ecological relationships reflect?The findings of the thesis are as follows:(1)In The Call of the Wild,the proportion of the distribution of transitivity processes from high to low is: material processes(60.30%),relational processes(17.47%),mental processes(9.73%),behavioral processes(5.80%),verbal processes(5.80%)and existential processes(1.67%).(2)The proportion of material processes between humans and non-human creatures is the highest.The ecological relationships between different humans and non-human creatures are different,which is mainly based on utilization,maltreatment and harmonious coexistence,mainly with eco-ambivalent discourses,eco-destructive discourses and eco-beneficial discourses.The proportion of material processes between non-human creatures is still the highest.The ecological relationships between non-human creatures are mainly competition,hunting and harmonious coexistence,mainly with eco-ambivalent discourses and eco-beneficial discourses.The proportion of material processes and verbal processes between humans is relatively high.The ecological relationships between humans are based on interests,mainly with eco-destructive discourses.(3)The ecological relationships between humans and nonhuman creatures show that there is extreme inequality between them,which reveals anthropocentrism.But as long as humans treat non-human creatures equally and friendly,nonhuman creatures will also give back to humans.The ecological relationships between non-human creatures reflect the ecological thought of “natural selection,survival of the fittest” and returning to nature.The ecological relationships between humans are based on interests,which is full of uncertainty and is bound to damage ecological environment to a certain extent.Therefore,in order to achieve the harmonious and balanced development of ecological nature,humans should first understand they are only members of nature,not centers.So,they should abandon anthropocentrism.Moreover,humans should establish the ecological consciousness of protecting non-human creatures,protecting nature and returning to nature to deeply realize that “clear waters and green mountains are as valuable as mountains of gold and silver”.It can be seen that this thesis has research value in both theory and practice.Firstly,it confirms the value of the transitivity system,and also enriches the research methods of The Call of the Wild.Secondly,it explores the ecological thought contained in The Call of the Wild,which is helpful to arouse people’s ecological consciousness and call on people to protect the ecological environment.