An Ecological Discourse Analysis Of Disaster News Reports From The Perspective Of Transitivity System

Ecolinguistics is a new discipline which has been extended in recent decades because of the increasing environmental problems.One of the significant assignments of ecolinguistics is to carry out ecological discourse analysis.Ecological discourse analysis emerged in the period of “ecological turn” in human civilization,arts and humanities,which probes into the relationship between language and ecology and reveals the effects of language on different ecological relationships.The research of the ecological discourse analysis is preliminarily formed abroad,but it is at the initiating stage at home,mainly concerning feasibility,methodology and application.In the case of the research of ecological discourse analysis,scholars in various fields are attempting to construct their own discourse analysis framework from different perspectives.So far,studies of ecological discourse analysis have been done mostly from the perspective of ecological critical discourse analysis.In 2018,the California fires caught the world’s attention.This thesis selects sixty-four disaster news reports on the California fires from The New York Times as the data.Qualitative approach is adopted in this thesis.Guided by ecocentrism and one assumption and three principles,and based on the transitivity system of Systemic Functional Linguistics,the thesis carries out an ecological discourse analysis in order to reveal ecological significance reflected by disaster news reports.The study aims to solve these three problems:(1)What are the classifications and distribution patterns of process types of headlines?(2)What are the ecological orientations of the first participant role in headlines?(3)What are the ecological orientations of the relationship of human—physical places,human—social places and human—non-human organisms?Results are shown in the following points.The disaster news reports discourses are eco-beneficial and eco-ambivalent discoourses.For one thing,being part of the new direction of development of Systemic Functional Linguistics,this research presents itself as an illustration foretelling the great potential of Systemic Functional Linguistics in the development of ecolinguistics.For another,by studying the ecological discourse analysis of news reports discourses,the journalists can create more beneficial ecological discourses,which will promote the development of beneficial and ambivalent ecological discourses,reducing the use of destructive ecological discourses.