Systemic Functional Approach To The Ecological Discourse Analysis Of The Commentaries Of The Nature Documentary

The emergence of ecolinguistics in recent years has been fueled by the escalating ecological and environmental issues and the demand for sustainable development.Ecological discourse analysis(EDA),one of the key ecolinguistics study avenues,analyzes the language system and how language affects the ecological environment.So far,EDA research on nature documentaries is still limited.To analyze the ecological consciousness and linguistic devices in nature documentaries,this study uses the BBC nature documentary Eden: Untamed Planet as the research material.It does so by responding to the following two questions:1)What kind of representation of nature does the documentary create? 2)How does the documentary appeal to the audience’s ecological awareness? The study’s corpus,which totals 10,034 words,is drawn from the first three episodes of the documentary program.The researcher first annotated the corpus using the corpus labeling tool UAM Corpus Tool 3.0 by making reference to the frameworks of both the transitivity system and the appraisal system expanded by domestic ecolinguists.Then,the researcher exported the data,performed a thorough analysis of it,and came to conclusions.Additionally gathered were viewer comments to verify the impacts of the documentary on the audience.The transitivity analysis suggested that the documentary represented nature as an independent and autonomous individual capable of influencing itself and its surroundings,with harmonious symbiotic relationship between species.It is in line with the ecosophy of “pluralistic harmony and ecological autonomy” advocated in this study.Specific linguistic means include using a large number of action processes and occurrence processes to describe events in the ecosystem and using many attribution type and recognition type relational processes to represent the intrinsic attributes of ecology.Further ergative analysis of material processes indicated some ecologically beneficial language patterns.The appraisal analysis revealed that positive appraisal resources were used to influence the attitude of the audience towards nature.The specific linguistic strategies include positive judgment on the capability and tenacity of animals and plants,as well as positive appreciation of the ecosystem’s balance and complexity.Also,the use of up-scale force and sharpening focus compressed the dialogic space,thus strongly conveying ecological values to the audience.Engagement resources were found less in the documentary.In addition,observations on comments from viewers indicated that the documentary had really caused the audience to appreciate the nature and reflect on the relationship between human and nature.On the basis of the aforementioned findings,some ecologically beneficial language patterns were summarized and some suggestions for the creation of nature documentary commentary were given.