An Ecolinguistic Analysis Of Appraisal System

The development of ecological science has enabled mankind to acquire more ecological knowledge.However,ecological knowledge does not necessarily lead to ecological behavior.At present,the ecological crisis is still growing,and human beings are still in the predicament of unsustainable development.In the face of ecological crisis,the cultivation of ecological awareness and the internalization of environmental ethics have become the top priority.Language is one of the ways to shape ecological awareness.Critical linguistics believes that ideology can not only be conveyed through language but also be shaped through language.However,critical linguistics takes the power relation in language as the main research object and pays little attention to ecological issues.Taking care of both the ideological perspective of language and ecological issues,Ecolinguistics emerged as a new discipline,one of whose main research paradigms is ecological discourse analysis.Ecological discourse analysis takes the influence of language on ecology as the main research content,and the ecological ideas in language system and the discourse as the main research object.Under the background of increasingly severe ecological crisis,ecological discourse analysis has greatly developed,with its disciplinary system and ecological philosophy rapidly constructing,and related empirical researches gradually covering more ecological contexts.At the same time,ecological discourse analysis still has shortcomings in aspects of evaluation analysis and language strategy research.First of all,the linguistic parameters of most researches emphasize the significance of ideational meaning,andneglect the impact of appraisal on ecological awareness.Secondly,an analytical framework that fully considers all appraisal resources remains to be developed.Finally,there is little research on the evaluation strategies for improving ecological awareness.In view of these facts,this thesis takes ecological discourse analysis as the main research methodology,and the appraisal resources in ecological discourse as the main research object,with the ecological philosophy,appraisal theory,the semantic field theory and logic semantic relationship theory of systemic functional linguistics as the theoretical basis.Also,by means of quantitative analysis methods,it studies the appraisal features in the ecological discourse to answer the following three questions:(1)What is the analytical framework for appraisal resources in ecological discourse?(2)What are the characteristics of the explicit and implicit appraisal resources in environmental media discourses?(3)How to use evaluative strategies to cultivate the readers' ecological awareness?This study first constructs a “people-oriented” analytical framework by discussing such basic issues as anthropocentrism in ecological philosophy and thoughts of positive discourse analysis,inter-subjectivity in systemic functional linguistics,especially the appraisal theory,and by integrating appraisal system.With this framework,it then analyzes environmental media discourses.In order to make up for the shortcomings of Chinese corpus research in ecological discourse analysis,and to provide suggestions for Chinese environmental discourse writing,this study collected 30 Chinese environmental media discourses as corpus from the “China News Award”(2009-2018)according to the criteria of subject relevance,genre equilibrium,high to low price and chronological balance.After that,attitude,engagement,graduation and the appraised were marked,and in-depth data analysis was carried out with the use of corpus-based quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis methods.The main findings are as follows:Firstly,it discusses the human subjectivity,particularity,the justification of human interests,the connotation of anthropocentrism,the paradox and motivation of nonanthropocentrism,and the pros and cons of the “human-center”.With these basic ecological philosophical problems,this study proposes an ecosophy of “peopleoriented” holism as the ethical norm of ecological discourse analysis,which considersboth natural attributes and social attributes of humans,considers human as both individual and categorical entity,and considers ecological subjects on both temporal and spatial dimensions(six factors),to grasp the integrity of the ecological problems.The holistic ecosophy of “people-oriented” believes that in addition to the relationship between human and nature,the relationship among humans is also important.The relationship adjusted by attitude resources between the human subjects inside the discourse and the reader,and the relationship adjusted by the dialogic resources(engagement and graduation)between the readers and the author,are also of ecological significance.In addition,whether language can establish a harmonious ecological relationship is also influenced by the context.Therefore,this study proposes an analytical framework that includes such key parameters as attitude,dialogue space,ecological subject,register and genre.Secondly,inscriptions in the corpus are marked and calculated according to the analytical framework established,and the distributions of appraisal resources in the corpus are found to have the following characteristics.In terms of attitude resources,subsystems are tend to be appreciation and judgement in type,and positive in polarity.The proportion of positive attitudes is much higher than that of the negative.Moreover,the main objects to be appraised in environmental news are still humans,and among humans it is individual people who are most likely to be appraised.In respect of media genres,the affect and appreciation resources of features are significantly more distributed compared to news and comment genre,while the proportion of judgment resources are relatively small.In respect of subsystems,happiness and safety are the key categories of affect subsystem,and the proportion of negative affect resources is greater than that of the appreciation and judgment subsystems.Appreciation resources tend to be positive,and negative ones are mostly compositions and used to appraise conditions.Judgement resources have the largest proportion of in the news genre,the smallest in the feature genre,and middle in the commentary genre.Both appreciation and judgement resources construct two images of nature,one is a beautiful,precious and respectable image of moral model,the other is a powerful,terrible and ruthless image of the perpetrator.In addition,nature's emotions always act effectively in tandem with human emotions.In terms of dialogic resources,attitudes in award-winning environmental media discourses are dominantly engaged by monoglossia,while within the heteroglossia,most resources are expanded.Generally speaking,the negotiation space of attitude is limited,and the ideal readers are mainly the internal members of the speech community.From the perspective of different media genres,the news genre takes cares of more voices than others,while the feature genre provides relatively large dialogue space with different voices,and the commentary genre presents the stance in an unquestionable way.From the perspective of environmental themes,attitudes engaged by monoglossia reach peak in the themes of environmental management and climate change,while attitudes engaged by heteroglossia are most in the theme of desertification and afforestation.The proportion of force rates high in graduation,while focus rates low.As the dominant resources are force-raise,the dialogue space constructed is contractive.However,considering the ratio of adjusted and unadjusted attitudes,the dialogue space constructed by graduation is generally expanded.In addition,attitudes and dialogue resources have a tendency to couple.The rising tone is more likely coupled with negative emotions and positive appreciating.Attitudes engaged by heteroglossia are mostly judgment in all media genres,which indicates that the authors are more cautious on social esteem and tend to be straight on issues of emotion,aesthetics and moral judgment.Thirdly,according to analytical framework of Appraisal,the analysis procedure,as well as the distribution characters of appraisal resources in environmental media discourses,this study finds that the price-winning texts are overall conducive to ecological awareness,as the beneficial discourses in them are more than destructive ones.The destructiveness mainly concerns the facts that some texts do not take all the importance ecological subjects into consideration,and that some texts construct nature as immoral actor.The beneficialness are reflected in aspects of attitude types,polarity,coupling of attitude and dialogic resources,and so on.The ambivalence are mainly shown in the negative appreciations of conditions,human activities and mad-made entities.Based on the analysis of environmental media discourses,this thesis proposes that environmental journalists can construct beneficial ecological discourses from threeaspects: the use of attitude resources,the adjustment of dialogue space and the choice of media genre.In the use of attitude resources,the author can promote readers' moral emotions with personal emotions and aesthetic emotions,promote positive emotions with negative emotions,and stimulate readers' personal emotions with the nature's emotions.In terms of dialogue space regulation,expanding resources are more suitable for collocation of judgment,especially social esteem;contractive resources are more suitable for matching affect and appreciation,especially negative affect and positive appreciation.As for the choice of genre,feature genre is more effective in environmental ethics internalization as for the media discourses,for it can make use of almost all evaluative strategies.This study combines appraisal theory and the theories of ecological philosophy and psychology to explore the appraisal model of ecological discourse analysis,so as to integrate appraisal resources and ecological perspectives.Theoretically,it intends to enrich and improve the current discipline construction of ecological discourse analysis,and provides the basis for the analysis of appraisal resources in ecological discourse.Practically,this study examines the evaluative characteristics of Chinese environmental media discourses and provides evaluative strategies for constructing beneficial ecological discourses.