An Eco-Critical Discourse Analysis On “Interest Directness” In English Environmental Reports

In recent years,with the increasing environmental problems,many people begin to realize the importance of protecting the environment.Many researchers try to make use of the power of language to protect the environment through the study of the relationship of language and the environment.Meanwhile,the eco-critical discourse analysis is a newly developed branch of the eco-linguistics,which reveals the ecological or non-ecological ideology through the analysis of the discourse.At present,many linguists have already analyzed all kinds of discourses including the political speech,news discourse and the advertisements and so on.By means of analyzing the non-ecological elements and the hidden ideology,they hope to remind the human beings to construct an ecological harmonious language and grammar system.But few have studied the “interest directness” in environmental news discourse from the eco-critical discourse analysis.In this paper,the author chooses environmental news reports from China daily and CNN.With Fairclough's three-dimensional model as the framework,this thesis will be conducted from the following three levels: at description level,lexical classification,transitivity,passive voice and salience will be applied to analyze the linguistic features of the text.At interpretation level,the production process of news samples is analyzed from the two aspects: news source and reporting moods.At explanation level,the causes of the differences will be revealed by analyzing the institutional context and societal context.This paper consists of three research questions:(1)what language strategies are being applied in the new reporters?(2)How ideologies are uncovered in news reports?(3)What interests they are going to protect?Through the analysis of the selected environmental news samples,the major findings in this paper are as follows: in the first place,news reporters will use manylanguage strategies to conduct the reports,such as lexical classification,transitivity,passive voice and salience and so on.In the second place,the news reporter's ideologies are always implanted in the report.In the third place,news reporters do not report any news randomly,they represent the interests of their own country or the government.The significance of this paper is as follows: First,the research methods of environmental news discourse is enriched.Second,the readers should cultivate a critical reading awareness in reading environmental news discourse.Third,the news reporters have interest directness,they tend to protect their own countries' interests,so we have to improve the influences of our own country.