The Ecological Discourse Analysis Of Chinese And American CSR Reports Of New Energy Vehicle Enterprises

Under the increasingly severe situation of global climate change,countries worldwide have put forward the goal of “carbon neutrality” to protect the environment and cope with the climate change.While domestic and foreign ecological linguists all took an active part in environmental protection,as for the applied research on ecological linguistics,domestic scholars did not attach importance to corporate social responsibility(CSR)reports.As the non-profit reports for companies to disclose their social responsibility performance,CSR reports are increasingly becoming essential text materials for investors and all sectors of society to understand enterprises.Therefore,the thesis takes BYD and Tesla,two typical representatives of new energy vehicle enterprises in China and America,as examples to conduct a comparative ecological discourse analysis(EDA)on the CSR reports to explore whether the enterprises conform to or disobey the ecological philosophy.Under the guidance of the ecological philosophy of “harmonious symbiosis” and based on the Appraisal Theory proposed by Martin and White,the thesis conducts a comparative EDA on CSR reports in regard to the distributions of appraisal resources and specific examples.Specifically,the theoretical framework suitable for the EDA on CSR reports is established,a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods is adopted,and such corpus tools as Ant Conc and UAM,as well as the statistical tool SPSS are used to manually label and test the relevance of appraisal resources in the two corpora.The results show that the appraisal resources in BYD’s and Tesla’s CSR reports help unite the ecological subjects within and outside the speech community,and promote the harmonious coexistence among various ecological subjects by expressing positive attitudes towards ecological subjects and adjusting the dialogic space,which conform to the ecological philosophy of the thesis.In terms of the distributions of appraisal resources,Tesla’s CSR reports apply significantly more attitude,heterogloss engagement and graduation appraisal resources than BYD’s CSR reports do.In the attitude system,the CSR reports of both enterprises tend to use more judgement and appreciation resources to show positive attitudes.The BYD’s CSR reports are inclined to use more composition appreciation resources,while Tesla’s CSR reports prefer the use of tenacity judgement resources.In the heterogloss engagement system,the CSR reports of both enterprises tend to use more contract resources and Tesla’s CSR reports use more heterogloss resources than BYD’s CSR reports do.In the graduation system,the CSR reports of the two enterprises use significantly more force resources than focus resources.The reasons for those similarities and differences in the distributions of appraisal resources and the ecological significance conveyed by appraisal resources in the CSR reports may be attributed to the genre,the development philosophy of enterprises and the cultural differences between China and America.The study presents a novel perspective to approach CSR reports research,and expands the scope of applied research on ecological linguistics.In practice,it will help readers understand the ecological orientation of CSR reports of new energy vehicle enterprises and provide references for new energy vehicle enterprises in writing the English version of CSR reports.