| Discourse undertakes the function of constructing entities as a means for the representation of social practice.Energy security as an abstract concept is thus the product of the construction of energy discourse and the result of the representation of linguistic means.Energy security is an important part of national security,and it is mainly constructed by government organizations,energy enterprises,environmental organizations and the mass media,while regarding many aspects of energy security,especially the rationality or legitimation of energy technology in energy production security,the discourses of governmental and non-governmental organizations often have great differences or even opposite opinions.This study focuses on the discursive construction of legitimation in energy security discourse.Specifically,this thesis was an attempt to investigate how DOE(Department of Energy)and EWG(Environmental Working Group)of America use language resources to(de)legitimize hydraulic fracturing respectively,and explore the similarities and differences between the two corpora from three dimensions,namely,textual topics,discursive strategies,and linguistic means,with the methods of discursive-historical approach and corpus-assisted analysis.The purpose of this study is to explore the strategies of discursive construction on energy technology reality in energy security discourse and the distribution characteristics of discourse resources in corresponding institutional reports.The analysis reveals that the linguistic paradigms used in the reports released by the DOE and the EWG in the process of legitimizing and delegitimizing fracking show marked differences.At the level of discursive topics,(de)legitimation is achieved through the differentiated topic emphasis of the two corpora.The DOE reports achieve legitimation by highlighting its macroscopic connection with the US political economy,energy security and electricity livelihood,while the EWG,on the other hand,delegitimizes it by focusing on the micro-levels,such as its risks to human health and ecological impacts.Furthermore,in terms of discourse strategies and linguistic means of its realization,the(de-)legitimation of discursive construction of hydraulic fracturing relies on differentiated means of linguistic representations.Firstly,the DOE legitimizes nomination at the lexical level through membership categorization and constructs in-group homogeneity through the use of possessive pronouns and metonymy.Secondly,employing positive prosody collocates and negative prosody collocates to reversely construct its legitimation at the predicational level.Thirdly,the legitimation of the textual construction is achieved through the use of perspectivization strategies focusing on quotations from within the governmental organization.Fourthly,the DOE adopts the argumentation strategies of topos of usefulness,topos of knowledge,and topos of finance to achieve the legitimation construction at the semantic level.Finally,the legitimation of the grammatical dimension of the modality is achieved through the use of the positive,high value of probability and obligation modalities.In contrast,the delegitimation construction of the EWG reflects the objective and scientific orientation.It mainly employs the referential form of neutral nouns based on usage in nomination;at the level of predicational collocation,it mainly relies on neutral prosody collocates;in terms of the perspectivization of the text,all kinds of references are evenly distributed;with regard to the argumentation strategy concerning semantic,it adopts topos of disadvantage,topos of humanitarian,topos of abuse and reality to support its claims;and at the aspect of grammatical modality,both obligation modulation and probability modalization with median or low value is used to intensify their authority and achieve delegitimation.Taking the EWG as a reference,the discourse characteristics of the DOE’s hydraulic fracturing reports,the fact that it is used as a tool to defend the established energy policy,as well as its capitalist ideology nature,is more clearly clarified. |
