Analysis Of Ecological Sense Of Place In Zen Poems Based On Transitivity Theory

Nowadays,people are confronted with the increasingly severe global environmental problems.Environmental degradation urges people to contemplate the problems from the perspective of ecology and reflect on human’s behavior.Against this background,ecological discourse analysis,which is dedicated to revealing the relationship between language and ecology,emerges.As a kind of beneficial discourse,Zen poems boasts significant value in the research of ecological discourse analysis.Ecological sense of place put forward by Chinese scholars He Wei and Zhang Ruijie focuses on the relationship between human and ecological place,which is an important part of ecological discourse analysis theory and plays an important role in ecological discourse analysis of Zen poems.Halliday’s transitivity system can construe the speaker’s experience and understanding of the world,which can be applied to the analysis of different discourses.Therefore,this thesis will make a detailed analysis of the ecological sense of place in Zen poems based on Halliday’s transitivity theory and ecological discourse analysis.This thesis tries to solve three questions: 1)What is the distribution of the transitivity system in Zen poems? 2)What is the realization of the transitivity system in Zen poems? 3)What kind of ecological sense of place is constructed in Zen poems through transitivity system?Based on Chinese scholar Zhang Jinhui’ s classification of Zen poems,this thesis collects about 600 Zen poems,out of which 50 poems are selected for the transitivity analysis.Under the framework of ecological discourse analysis,this research first calculates the distribution of transitivity system in Zen poems and then detailed qualitative analysis is conducted to identify the realization of the transitivity system in Zen poems.Finally,based on the distribution and realization of the transitivity system,this thesis will discuss the ecological sense of place contained in Zen poems.After the analysis,it is found that the 50 Zen poems manifest beneficial ecological sense of place.In terms of the participant in Zen poems,the covert human participant accounts for the largest proportion.Through playing down the status of human,the employment of the covert human participant makes other participants in the place more salient,thus emphasizing the theme of nature.In terms of the transitivity processes,material process,mental process and relational process in Zen poems take the largest proportion.The material process manifests human’s proximity in conation towards place.The mental process manifests human’s assimilation in cognition and affection in emotion towards place.The attribute in relational process indicates human’s comfortable state and the unique beauty of nature.In addition,by bestowing the non-human organism participant,physical place participant and social place participant with the human attribute through personification,this kind of representation manifests the harmonious communion between human and other participants in the place.In terms of the circumstance,the place of location circumstantial in Zen poems accounts for the largest proportion,which shows the serenity of the place where poets and monks choose to stay.The beneficial ecological sense of place manifested in Zen poems provides people with a good example of depicting the harmony among human,nature and social place,which will contribute to language civilization construction in ecological civilization construction and the improvement of people’s ecological literacy from the linguistic dimension.The covert human participant and the personified non-human participants also provide a good example of more ecological use of language in public signs,advertisements and Internet,which will be beneficial to reducing language pollution.Besides,the analysis of the ecological sense of place in Zen poems shows the feasibility of applying transitivity theory and ecological discourse analysis theory to conducting discourse analysis,which may stimulate relevant studies in the future.