Ecological Research On Food Safety News Discourse From The Perspective Of Transitivity System

The ecological study of food safety news discourse is the process of exploring the linguistic representation of food safety ecosystem in ecological environment,and the ecological discourse analysis is carried out by applying the transitivity system theory.From the perspective of transitivity system,this study combines the theory of ecolinguistics to study the transitivity system in food safety news discourse,explores the ecological consciousness hidden behind food safety news reports,and ecologically constructs food safety news discourse,so as to guide readers to better maintain the ecological balance of food safety.This study selects 50 representative food safety news discourses from China Daily from 2020 to2022 to build a small closed corpus.A combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis is adopted,and UAM Corpus Tool is used as a quantitative research tool to annotate the transitivity systems in the corpus combined with manual annotation.According to the classification model of transitivity system proposed by Halliday,this paper qualitatively analyzes the distribution of three components,process,participant and circumstance,and their influence on ecological discourse.News ecological discourse describes the construction model of ecological system with practical significance through the allocation of ecological factors of transitivity system and the combination of ecological discourse analysis theory to explain the ecological attitude of transitivity system in food safety news discourse and the relationship between transitivity system and ecological environment in food safety news discourse.The purpose of this study is to solve the following three questions: How is the transitivity system distributed in food safety news discourse? What types of ecological discourse in food safety news discourse are presented by the transitivity system? What ecological attitudes can be revealed in news discourse on food safety?The results show that the material process,relational process,verbal process and mental process tell the main framework of ecosystem construction.The distribution of participants is mediated by life participants/lifeless participants,individual/group and authoritative factors.The location,manner and cause of circumstances provide the main background information of ecosystem and enhance the practical significance of ecological construction.Firstly,according to the overall distribution of the transitivity system in food safety news discourse,the proportion of processes,participants and circumstances in the whole transitivity system is different,and the proportion of participants is the highest.It can be seen that,although process is the core of the transitivity system,participant in food safety news discourse plays a more significant role in the process of interpreting ecological attitudes.In terms of the distribution of processes,material process is used most frequently,accounting for a proportion slightly larger than the sum of other processes,indicating that material process in food safety news discourse is more important in constructing ecological attitudes;In terms of the distribution of participants,the proportion of human living and non-human physical participants is higher than that of non-human living and social participants,indicating that the food safety news discourse focused on describing human living and non-human physical participants;In terms of the distribution of circumstances,the frequency of Location and Cause is high,indicating that food safety news discourse focuses more on the time,place and cause of the event.The expression of Location and Cause plays an important role in revealing the ecological attitudes behind food safety news discourse.Secondly,by analyzing the process,participant and circumstance in the corpus,the paper classifies news discourse into three ecological categories: beneficial discourse,ambivalent discourse and destructive discourse.Thirdly,three kinds of ecological attitudes that can be revealed in food safety news discourse on the basis of transitivity system: positive,neutral and negative.The significance of the study is mainly reflected in: The study attempts to explore the feasible model of ecological discourse analysis under the transitivity path.It not only provides a new research perspective for the further study of ecological discourse analysis from the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics,but also provides rich language resources for the analysis of transitivity system through quantitative and qualitative analysis.Theoretically,the study of transitivity system from the perspective of ecological discourse analysis is helpful to expand the research scope of ecolinguistics and promote the further development of ecological discourse analysis.In practice,through the ecological analysis of transitivity system,this study reveals the ecological features in food safety news discourse,helps readers develop critical thinking awareness and awakens the public’s awareness of food safety protection.This study aims to explain the ecological significance of news discourse from the perspective of transitivity system,analyze its ecological types,and guide human beings to form ecological consciousness of harmonious coexistence with nature.