| In recent years, eco-tourism flourished throughout the world, which has contributed to reducing human beings’ negative impact on ecological environment and ensuring the sustainable uses of tourism resources. The development of eco-tourism has promoted the appearance of eco-hotel, which refers to a hotel that has made important improvements to its structure in order to minimize its impact on the environment. An eco-hotel is distinct from other hotels for its efforts to protect the environment, which are often explicitly coded in its instructions. Eco-hotel introductions, by the means of discourse, introduce to the potential customers the location, surroundings, facilities and activities available, with the goal of attracting customers. These introductions, to some extent, will improve the public’s ecological awareness and make contributions to the whole society.Eco-critical discourse analysis is a new thriving field of ecolinguistics. In the past few decades, many scholars have been trying to explore the relationships between language and nature from different perspectives, thus rendering the emergence of ecolinguistics and green grammar. But so far, however, it seems that these approaches did not give us a satisfactory answer to address the most urgent issue without exploring language itself-the internal grammar. To make up for this discrepancy, the current thesis conducts an eco-critical discourse analysis on 20 pieces of eco-hotel introductions by applying Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of discourse analysis. Both the quantitative and qualitative research methods are employed to analyze the transitivity and appraisal resources in the eco-hotel instructions, to explore the green grammar embedded in the eco-hotel instructions and therefore to interpret the relationships and interactions between linguistic choice and the construction of ecological civilization.Based on the analysis, the following conclusions can be drawn. Firstly, the examination of lexical-grammatical features from the two perspectives of transitivity resources and appraisal resources at the description stage shows that:(1) only four process types (i.e. material, relational, mental and existential processes) are employed in the introducing discourse, among which material and relational clauses rank high, respectively accounting for 54.81 and 36.82 percent. In contrast, mental and existential clauses are sporadically distributed, respectively accounting for 4.60 and 3.77 percent. The verbal and behavior clauses do not appear in the data; (2) the appraisal resources of attitude, engagement and graduation respectively occupied 57.17,14.29 and 28.57 percent. In attitude resources, appreciation resources rank highest, accounting for 91.67 percent. In appreciation resources, the sub-types of reaction, composition and valuation respectively account for 22.73 percent,4.55 percent and 72.73 percent. Judgment resources account for 8.33 percent, and there is no affect resource. Secondly, the analysis at the interpretation stage indicates that green grammar is not only concealed in material, relational, mental and existential clauses, but also in attitude, engagement and graduation resources. These clauses are non-anthropocentric in that such "things" are used as actors and the relational and existential processes are employed to create a co-existent situation of human and non-human beings. Besides, many appraisal resources are positive and ecological. Thirdly, the explanation stage explores the two-way relationship between linguistic choice and the construction of ecological civilization. The eco-hotel instructions are socially shaped and socially constructive. Given that language plays a significant role in constructing our experience, reality, and therefore our actions, the eco-hotel instructions will help us promote multidimensional thinking and change our awareness of the relationship between language and nature.The research is deemed to be of some theoretical and practical significance. Theoretically, the research contributes to the application of Fairclough’s model of critical discourse analysis within the paradigm of eco-critical discourse analysis. Practically, the research is expected to awaken, direct and change human awareness of environment and nature and thus help to construct ecological civilization. |
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