A Study Of The English Commentary In Ecological Documentary From Functional Stylistic Perspective

With the rapid development of global economics and science and technology, people’s living environment has been changing quickly. Today, behind the dramatic advances in material civilization, ecological and environmental problems have caught more and more people’s eyes. Ecological documentary is a product in such a social situation and historical background. In the aspect of evoking and promoting people’s environmental consciousness, ecological documentary, through its special way, shows nature’s true color, reality, beauty and ecological environment’s deterioration, causing strong resonance of a broad audience and realizing such purposes as delivering the protecting consciousness of ecological environment and appealing to people to protect the nature environment.In such a process, the effect of commentary is particularly important. It can not only highlight the themes, but also make up the insufficiency caused by time and space. And it plays an important role in delivering information to the audience. However, up to now, there are limited attentions and researches towards the stylistic features of the English commentary in ecological documentary. Wild China, as the master work of the ecological documentary, achieves great communicative effect by the help of its English commentary which has unique glamour. With the English commentary derived from the ecological documentary—Wild China as the corpus, this thesis has the following main purposes:Firstly, on the basis of Systemic Functional linguistics (SFL) constructed by Halliday, this study intends to find out the stylistic features of the English commentary in ecological documentary from functional stylistic perspective.Secondly, according to the analysis of the English commentary in Wild China, this thesis tries to prove that the theory of functional stylistics is feasible in analyzing the stylistic features of the English commentary.Thirdly, this study will not only prove that functional stylistics is a scientific and effective theory of stylistic analysis, but also broaden the theory’s research fields. As the previous stated, it has theoretical and practical significances.This thesis is organized in five chapters. Chapter one is a brief introduction to the research, covering motivation of the thesis, purpose of the research, significance of the research, data collection, methodology and the layout of the thesis. Chapter two gives the related literature review of the thesis, including the subject of the thesis, the development of functional stylistics, the present state of the commentary in English documentary and Wild China. Chapter three presents the theoretical framework of the research, consisting of the style, stylistics, functional stylistics, the register theory and the metafunctional theory. Chapter four is the main part of the thesis. According to the theory of register and metafunctions, it presents a register analysis and a stylistic analysis on the English commentary in Wild China. Chapter five summarizes the major findings of the research, points out the limitations of the research and gives the suggestions for the further research.The major findings of the thesis are concluded as the following:1. Through the analysis of the ideational functions, we can see that the material processes account for the highest proportion in the transitivity system. That’s because there are a large number of wildlife’s actions in the ecological documentary. Comparatively speaking, the relational processes also take a great proportion. Those clauses fulfill the task of presenting the customs of people and the habits of wildlife in detail. They are together showing a vivid and complete ecological world through the English commentary.2. In terms of the interpersonal function analysis, mood and tense are what we care about most. The declarative mood is used frequently, that’s because the aim of the English commentary in ecological documentary is to deliver information to the audience. What’s more, the simple present tense is widely used in the English commentary. It proves that the ecological documentary which records the regular or habitual actions of people or wildlife or describes their states of being is of great objectivity. Since some historical backgrounds should be introduced, the relatively high usage of past tense should be emphasized here,3. The textual function analysis is conducted from the thematic structure and the cohesion devices. In terms of the thematic structure, the unmarked theme is frequently used in the ecological documentary, which shows that in this way, the English commentary can make the audience receive information clearly and directly. In terms of the cohesion devices, reference, conjunction in the grammatical cohesion and reference, synonymy/antonymy and collocation in the lexical cohesion are relatively used frequently. In view of the leaping of the images in the ecological documentary, these cohesion devices properly play a role as a bridge link, and achieve great rhetorical effect, such as highlighting the theme, deepening the impression and so on.To state briefly, through the analysis on the English commentary in ecological documentary—Wild China from the perspective of Functional Stylistics, we find out its stylistic features and further prove that the theories of functional stylistics can be used in the analysis of the English commentary in ecological documentary. The author hopes that the results of the research can be applied to many related fields, such as the creation of the English commentary, the analysis on the documentary, etc. In addition, the author expects that this thesis can play a part in enhancing people’s consciousness of ecological protection towards globalization and promoting China’s ecological documentary into internationalization.