An Eco-linguistic Analysis Of News Reports On The Restoration Of Xuzhou Coal Subsidence Area

Nowadays,with the deepening dissemination of news media,news reports not only play a social role in transmitting information,but also constantly change people's values and lifestyles.Ecological discourse analysis reflects the relationship between language and ecology,and can awaken and change human's awareness of environment and nature.The Hallidayan approach of ecolinguistics focuses on interpreting the relationship between language and ecosystem through linguistic analysis.Guided by the Deep Ecology and based on the theory of the Transitivity System and Evaluation Resources,this thesis intends to make an ecological discourse analysis of 70 news reports in Xuzhou Daily,aiming to reveal Xuzhou mainstream media's ideology of environment and to call for establishing an appropriate and beneficial ecosophy.This thesis will employ a qualitative and quantitative approach.Quantitative analysis of news discourse is under the framework of transitivity system and appraisal theory,supplemented by qualitative analysis.Quantitative analysis is mainly the classification and statistics of processes as well as the amount of attitude resources.This thesis is supposed to establish a framework suitable for the ecological analysis of discourse,and constructs an operational ecological discourse analysis model,which is discussed with Chinese corpus as an example.The results show that news discourse mainly relies on action processes and appreciation resources to represent ecological attributes.In view of the current prominent environmental problems in China,it is suggested that news discourse creation should increase the use of mental processes and highlight the life attribute of participants to stimulate positive emotional connections between human and nature,which would help people to take environmental-friendly actions on their own initiative.The theoretical contribution of this thesis is primarily reflected in two aspects.First,by combining Western ecological values,the thesis defines the value orientation and criteria for ecological discourse analysis which is conducive to ecological protection.Thus,with Chinese characteristics,it can largely guide the ecological analysis of language features of news reports and for the evaluation of their ecological values.Second,a tailored framework suitable for discourse ecological analysis is constructed,which contributes a more reasonable and feasible analysis mode for ecological linguistics research.