An Ecological Analysis Of The Reports On China’s Migrating Elephants In China Daily From The Perspective Of Attitude System

It is widely agreed that Ecolinguistics developed primarily as a branch of linguistics in the 1990 s.With its development,ecological discourse analysis gradually takes a critical position in Ecolinguistics.China‘s migrating elephants in the summer of 2021 attracted worldwide attention.The reports on this event in China Daily get a good response,which not only give a good explanation and clarification on the reasons why the herd left their original habitat but successfully articulate Chinese stand on ecological protection.Ecological discourse analysis is conducted in the vision of Attitude System to explore the ecological philosophy embedded in the repots and under the guidance of the ecological philosophy of “diversity and harmony,interaction and co-existence”.And the research object is 41 reports on elephant migration selected from China Daily,with the time span being from June to September in the year of 2021,with 18,688 words.Quantitative and qualitative methods are adopted in this study and the task of data annotation is done in the tool of Notepad++,including four dimensions: attitude resources,attitude polarity,explicitness and appraised objects.And data analysis is conducted with the assistance of the retrieval tool named Ant Conc.Quantitative analysis is applied to analyze the distributions and features of the attitude resources,and qualitative research is used to explore the ecological philosophy implied in the reports.First,attitude resources involved in the reports are covered in all categories,and among the attitude resources,judgement resource accounts for 48%,ranking the first.Followed by the appreciation resource,it occupies 31%.And affect resource is the least used,occupying 21%.Second,the features‘ analysis shows out that 77% of the attitude resources are positive and 23% are negative.It illustrates,in the selected materials,the relationship constructed between the subjects tends to be positive.From explicitness,inscribed attitude and invoked attitude are used to analyze the explicitness of the attitude resources.Third,most of attitude is expressed in an explicit way,as the inscribed resources account for 64%,with invoked resources occupying 36%,according to the analysis,the direct expression way is easier to be understood.And last,the ecological philosophy of “the harmony between man and nature” is revealed,based on above results and the analysis of the appraised objects.It is a useful attempt to combine the Attitude System with ecological discourse analysis and summarize the experiences of China Daily‘s successful report from the linguistic category.This attempt is favorable to explain China and take Chinese stand more clearly and to transmit Chinese values and ecological philosophy more effectively in the future.