| The vigorous development of the economy has steadily improved the quality of people’s life and made great social progress,while the eco-environmental deterioration has had a great impact on human society.In the face of serious environmental problems,experts and scholars from different disciplines hope to apply their knowledge to the protection of the environment.From the perspective of ecolinguistics,linguists study the relationship between language and the environment to reveal the influence of language on different ecological relationships and to analyze the role of language in exacerbating or improving the environment.Currently,domestic and international scholars have attempted to analyze a variety of texts from many angles,but few have studied news reports on Australian bush-fire from an ecolinguistic perspective at the comparative level.The Australian bush-fire in 2019 attracted worldwide attention.This study selects 60 news reports from the Sydney Morning Herald and China Daily about the Australian fires from September 2019 to March 2020 as the research corpus.Under the guidance of the Arran Stibbe’s eco-philosophical view,a combination of quantitative and qualitative research is conducted.Based on the transitivity system of Systemic Functional Linguistics,these processes in these reports are analyzed from the perspective of ecolinguistics,with a view to reveal the different ecological connotations and ecological consciousness embodied in these two newspapers.The study aims to answer these three problems:(1)What kinds of transitivity processes are employed on the Australian bushfire in two newspapers ?(2)What are the ecological features of the participants in the two newspapers?(3)What are the ecological consciousness employed in the two newspapers ?Research results are shown that both newspapers demonstrate action process and relational process the most,with mental process and communication process following behind,while existential processes are reflected less,meteorological processes are the least,and no behavioral processes is involved.The qualitative analysis reveals that The Sydney Morning Herald mainly reveals “valuing living”,“well-being”,“care”,with a focus on beneficial discourse.Whereas,China Daily,primarily lays emphasis on the ecosophy of “well-being”,“care”,and “resilience”with neutral words.Therefore,this study enriches the research scope of systemic functional linguistics and transitivity theory in the field of ecolinguistics through the comparative study of transitivity processes reflected in The Sydney Morning Herald and China Daily,and in the meantime,this study fosters readers’ critical consciousness and improves their comprehension of news articles.Finally,this study can draw more people’s attention to the impact of ecological damage on human society and raise their awareness of environmental protection. |
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