An Ecological Discourse Analysis Of Corporate Social Responsibility Report From The Perspective Of Attitude System

With the development of society and the influence of human activities,ecological problems have become increasingly prominent and environmental problems have attracted great attention.Under this circumstance,ecological research has received extensive attention from academia and developed rapidly.As a main research approach of ecolinguistics,ecological discourse analysis(Hereafter: EDA)focuses on the relationship between human beings,other species and environment,hoping to construct the harmonious development of humans and nature through discourse.Corporate social responsibility report(Hereafter: CSRR)is the construction of the relationship between the company,its stakeholders and ecological environment.It conveys how enterprises fulfill social and environmental responsibilities as a corporate citizen,and how they achieve sustainable development,so it contains a lot of language resources related to ecology.Appraisal Theory,developed by Martin et al.on the basis of Halliday’s Systematic Functional Linguistics,focuses on the evaluative meaning of discourse and examines the various attitudes negotiated in the text.Therefore,the evaluation mode analysis of discourse is very important to reveal the author’s ecological concept.The thesis takes the Attitude System of Appraisal Theory as the framework,selects the CSRRs released by Huawei and Apple from 2016 to 2020 as the corpus,and uses the software UAM Corpus Tool to label and count the attitude resources in the reports as exhaustively as possible.On this basis,the appraisal resources of ecological beneficial,ecological ambivalent and ecological destructive presented are counted.And with He Wei’s “diversity and harmony,interaction and co-existence” as the guidance of ecosophy,the distribution,realization and ecological property of attitude resources in Huawei and Apple’s CSRR are analyzed.The results show that Huawei and Apple have a lot in common in the use of attitude resources in their CSRRs.In terms of type of attitude,judgment resources are used most frequently in Huawei and Apple’s CSRRs.Appreciation comes second.And affect resources are the least.In terms of the polarity of resources,both of them tend to use positive resources in their CSRRs.In terms of the explicit and implicit resources,both companies tend to use explicit resources to directly express their attitudes towards the company,society and the environment.From the ecological property,eco-beneficial discourse is used most,eco-ambivalent discourse comes second and eco-destructive discourse are the least,the social responsibility reports of the two companies are generally ecologically beneficial.Through the above research,on the one hand,this thesis has a more comprehensive understanding of the attitudes of Huawei and Apple to economic,environmental and social responsibility.On the other hand,it is of great significance to improve corporate,society and people’s awareness of ecological protection,and to pursue sustainable development of people and the environment.