A Contrastive Study Of The Ecological Orientation Of Environment News Discourse In China Daily And The Times

In recent years,the environmental problems in the world have emerged one after another,and it has gradually become an important issue concerned by the media and academic circles around the world.In this context,more and more scholars begin to study ecological discourse analysis.However,few studies choose environment news reports as data,and few people combine relevant theories of journalism &communication with linguistics to conduct comparative studies on environment news discourse.Therefore,this thesis chooses environmental news reports in 2021 from the website of China daily and The Times as the data to conduct such research.Taking ecological discourse analysis as the research perspective,this study combines the theory of transitivity and news frame to examine the ecological orientation of the media in the two countries,using a combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis.Under the guidance of the ecological philosophy of ―diversity and harmony,interaction and co-existence‖,this study discusses and compares the ecological orientation of the frame and the discourse representation of environment news reports of the two media from the perspectives of the macro and micro analysis.On this basis,this thesis summarizes the differences in the ecological orientation of the environment news discourse in the two countries and explains the reasons for these differences.There are three main findings.(1)The topics and the keywords of the selected reports reflect the ideology that is in line with the ecosophy.So the news frames of the environment news reports in China Daily belong to the ecologically beneficial category.At the same time,the four elements of the middle-level structure used in them are diverse and interactive,which makes them more ecologically beneficial.The topics of the selected reports in The Times fall into the ecological ambivalent category and the keywords belong to the ecological beneficial category.Therefore,the news frames of the environment news reports in The Times are ecologically ambivalent.Besides,the diversity and interactivity of the four elements of the middle-level structure make them more ecologically ambivalent.(2)By analyzing the ecological orientations of the discourses presented by the processes types and the participant roles based on the ecosophy and the ecological judgment mechanism,this study finds that the percentage of the ecologically beneficial clauses in China Daily is higher than that in The Times.It can be said that the discourse representations in China Daily are more ecologically beneficial.(3)There exist three main reasons for the differences in the ecological orientations of the environment news reports as a whole,including the factor of environment,the factor of thinking mode and the factor of development stage.In summary,this study can help to promote the integration of the related theory of ecolinguistic and news frame theory and to provide a new research direction for ecological discourse analysis;besides,to some extent,this thesis can provide enlightenment on the ecological beneficial news frame and the expression of environment news discourse.