Positive Ecological Discourse Analysis From The Perspective Of Systemic Functional Linguistics

Nowadays,the awareness of environmental conservation has gradually taken root in people's hearts.Accordingly,numerous animal protection organizations have emerged one after another.Most of the texts on animal protection websites arouse people's attention to animals by exposing their ill-treatment of them.However,discourses directly associated with farm animals on the Farm Sanctuary website focus on animal's behavior,emotion and intelligence.This kind of expression highlights the subjectivity of animals as living individuals.From the judgement of Ecolinguistics,it is positive discourse.That is to say,this kind of discourse has positive effects on the sustainable development of ecosystem.Therefore,there is great positive significance in analyzing this kind of language expression and finding out its unique language patterns.This study intends to use the transitivity theory and attitude system in systemic functional linguistics to conduct a positive discourse analysis on the ecological texts related to animals.The selected discourses of this study are 12 passages directly discussing animals on the Farm Sanctuary website(https://www.farmsanctuary.org),which contain 11411 words and 58 pictures.This study is mainly analyzed from two aspects: text and image.On the text level,lexical choice,grammatical structure and attitude resources are discussed;on the image level,the analysis mainly includes different expressions of the animals in the picture,such as foregrounding,color contrast,as well as the facial expression and appearance of the animals.Based on these discussions,the influence of these language patterns and features on ecology is discussed.Through analysis,it is clear that the selected texts in this research have a strong positive effect from the ecological point of view.First of all,farm animals are placed in the position of agent in clauses.Besides,from the perspective of attitude resources,the texts describe the feeling,emotion,intelligence and thought of farm animals positively,and prove their credibility with a lot of facts.Finally,in the analysis of images,farm animals are also highlighted by ways such as foregrounding,color contrast and so on.