A Proximization Study Of Climate Change Documentary An Inconvenient Truth

Climate change alters landscapes,challenges economic systems,and threatens human lives.At present,communication studies hold most of the research on climate issues,and there are few in linguistics studies.In linguistics,relevant research mainly adopts three approaches: ecolinguistics,cognitive linguistics and critical discourse analysis.Among them,the Proximization Theory,from a critical cognitive perspective,provides an effective analytical framework for threat construction in public discourse.Therefore,this study attempts to conduct a proximization study on climate discourse and selects the climate change documentary An Inconvenient Truth as the analytical corpus to explore the threat construction pattern and the value orientations embodied in climate discourse.This study proposes three research questions:(1)What are the central and peripheral entities in the discourse of An Inconvenient Truth?(2)How is the threat construction of peripheral entities realized through proximization strategies in An Inconvenient Truth?(3)What are the value orientations embodied in the proximization strategy in An Inconvenient Truth?The combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis is adopted in this study as the research methods.Based on the analytical framework of the Proximization Theory,the software UAM Corpus Tool is used to assist data analysis in data annotation and frequency statistics of the lexico-grammatical items of proximization.The findings of this study are as follows:(1)In An Inconvenient Truth,the discourse entities are multi-faced,reflecting the conceptual transformation from an ecological issue into a scientific and political issue.There are four sets of central entities,including “Nature”,“People around the world”,“Climate practices” and “Cooperative partners”,they are the manifestation of natural and human-related elements;There are four sets of peripheral entities,including“Climate change and natural hazards”,“Humans”,“Contributors to pollution” and“Opposing forces”,they are the manifestation of the natural and human threat.(2)Spatial proximization plays a dominant role and is supported by temporal proximization and axiological proximization in threat construction.In spatial proximization,VPs demonstrate that the natural threat travels quickly and spans a vast range,constantly invade human living space and cause deadly impacts;NPs emphasize the destructive power of the natural and human threat,which portrays a catastrophic vision.Temporal proximization mainly relies on the “future-to-present”shift,highlighting the urgency of the threat and the need for pre-emptive action.Axiological proximization demonstrates the value opposition between the central and peripheral entities,and encourages the central entities to take the initiative.Moreover,there is a systematic functional compensation among the three proximization strategies.The natural threat construction is realized chiefly through spatial and temporal proximization,while the human threat construction relies on axiological proximization.(3)The proximization strategy reflects some positive value orientations,such as “ecological sustainability” and “take the initiative”.Yet,it also implies negative value orientations,such as “anthropocentrism” and “hierarchical power relations”.From the theoretical perspective,this study verifies the powerful explanatory power of the Proximization Theory in climate discourse.In the sense of practical significance,investigating the value orientations embodied in climate discourse is conducive to improving the public’s understanding of climate discourse and raising their critical thinking for public discourse.This study also provides enlightenment and inspiration for the global governance of climate change from the linguistics perspective.