Discoursal Constructions Of Low Carbon Economy In Economic News Reports From China Daily

With the continuous expansion of the global economy,the environmental and energy problems caused by the over use of energy have attracted the attention of all countries.The so-called low carbon economy is guided by the concept of sustainable development,which promotes the coordinated development of low carbon economy and environmental protection through low carbon technology investment,environmental protection policy,government supervision and other actions.Sustainable development is achieved through low carbon economic model and low carbon lifestyle.To cope with climate problems,the development of low carbon economy has became a global consensus.China is no exception.The first news report concerning low carbon economy was published in China Daily in 2002 which indicates that China began to be aware of“low carbon economy”.In 2007,President Hu Jintao made it clear at the 15~thh APEC leadership conference that China should develop a low carbon economy.Previous studies on low carbon economy have been mainly focused on the fields of environmental science,meteorology,public administration,economy,and so on.However,research from the perspective of discourse analysis is still limited.The present research will conduct an analysis based on transitivity and modality system within the Systemic-Functional Grammar and it is intended to reveal the changes and developments of the low carbon economy from 2007 to 2017.Transitivity is a semantic system and the linguistic realization of ideational function.Transitivity system can be further classified into six different processes:material process,relational process,verbal process,mental process,behavior process,and existential process(Hu Zhuanglin 2005).The interpersonal meaning is realized by modality system.Modal verbs are the most frequently used words to express interpersonal meaning and they can be classified into high,median and low value of modal verbs.Modal adjuncts are also the expressions used to realize the interpersonal function.The data for the research is 60 news reports around low carbon economy from 2007 to2017 from China Daily’s official website(http://www.chinadaily.com.cn).In 2007,President Hu Jintao proposed to develop a low carbon economy;in March 2010,the theme of“the Two Sessions”is eco-environmental protection and sustainable development.And the content of“The number one proposal”of CPPCC was low carbon economy and environmental protection;in November 2015,the Paris climate conference was held in Paris.Xi Jinping attended the conference and delivered an important speech.Three corpora are built(2007-2010,2011-2015,2016-2017)to reveal the differences in high frequency topic words,the distribution of six types of processes and modal verbs across the three stages and the the low carbon economy image of China.The comparative analysis reveals the following findings:1)The topics of the three stages have different focuses.The media was aimed to raise public’s awareness of low carbon economy in the first period.China Daily encouraged related departments to explore new energy sources and built China a leader role in the second period.The global cooperation was emphasized in the third period.2)The distributions of six types of processes and modal verbs across the three stages are different.Compared with the other two periods,the relational process and low value modal verbs were used the most in the first period to introduce the concept of low carbon economy and constructed a beneficial image of low carbon economy.The verbal process and median value modal verbs were used the most in the second period to call on the actions on low carbon economy by quoting the words of government officials and authorities,and encouraged the related departments to explore new energy sources.The material process and high value modal verbs were used the most in the third period to indicate the actions China has took and the faith for the future.3)From the perspectives of transitivity and modality system,China Daily permeated the low carbon discourse to the daily life of public and the development of China which pushing the development of low carbon economy.