An Analysis Of Greenpeace's Ecological Discourse—From The Perspective Of Systemic Functional Grammar

As economy and technology develop,more ecological issues have arisen with an impact on the global environment and the survival of all creatures.Hence,more and more people pay attention to ecological issues.As a new trend of linguistics,ecolinguistics has a history of nearly three decades.Focusing on the ecological issues,ecolinguistics analyzes interactions between language and ecology and investigates how language could impact on the ecology and how to make language eco-beneficial.A lot of people work together to fight against destructive activities to nature.Greenpeace,an NGO with an aim to "ensure the ability of the Earth to nurture life in all its diversity",posts articles on its website to call on more people to protect nature.To facilitate better understanding of the organization's ecological thoughts among people,the author makes an analysis of these articles in this thesis.Under the framework of systemic functional grammar,combined with the green grammar against anthropocentrism,classism and growthism,this thesis analyzes the generic structure of these articles with the aim to find out the features of beneficial discourse that can raise people's ecological awareness and to explore the ecological ideas that Greenpeace conveys.This thesis reveals that there are three moves in the structure of Greenpeace texts.The first move introduces the state of unspoiled nature.The second move focuses on the threat to nature.By describing the horrible destruction to nature,the second move makes the threat salient to draw people's attention to the natural destruction.Authors usually express their negative attitudes to the destruction by using some Modal Adjuncts,which influence the readers' attitudes to nature.The third move shows the strong desire for natural protection and calls on people to join in the progress of protecting nature.In these texts,the first move is optional while the other two moves are obligatory to enhance people's ecological awareness and to call on people to take action.It's also found that Greenpeace expresses strong ecological awareness by going against anthropocentrism,classism and growthism and advocating greenism with eco-beneficial discourse.Eco-beneficial discourse shows the positive attitude to the natural protection and criticizes the natural destruction.Conforming to the green grammar,Greenpeace mainly uses eco-beneficial discourse to raise people's ecological awareness and promote their ecological behaviors.In practice,the analysis of ecological discourse on Greenpeace's website is expected to help people change their ecological outlook,reflect on their unecological behaviors and take action to protect ecology.This thesis is helpful to awaken people's ecological awareness and promote ecological protection.In addition,this study encourages people to pay more attention to the influence of language on ecology.Academically,the present research explores the underlying patterns in eco-discourse that can arouse people's ecological awareness and studies how to construct eco-beneficial discourse.