Eco-discourse Analysis Of English Environmental News Reports On “Global Warming”

In recent years,environmental problems have become increasingly prominent,which makes scholars pay more and more attention to ecological and environmental protection.In the field of linguistics,many scholars are also trying to study how to protect the ecological environment through language.Ecolinguistics is a new subject.The aim of ecolinguistics is to explore the relationship between language and ecology and thus protect the ecological environment through the function of language.At present,many scholars have analyzed literary discourse,advertising discourse and speech discourse,but few have conducted ecological discourse analysis on news discourse,especially environmental news discourse.This study is based on the three-dimensional model of Fairclough's critical discourse analysis.One of the representative environmental issues – “global warming” is selected as the research object.The research materials of this study are twenty English news reports about global warming.The research methods are qualitative and quantitative research.This thesis will focus in the following three aspects,which includes the description of the transitivity process,the roles of participants in environmental news texts,the revelation of the non-ecological factors hidden in transitivity process clauses,and the discussion of the relationship between language and ecology.The findings suggest that on the level of description,all the other five and physical processes are employed in the text except the behavioral process.The most common types of clause processes are material process,followed by relational process and verbal process.However,mental process clauses,existential process clauses and behavioral process clauses are less employed in the texts.On the level of interpretation,first of all,we have formed the ecosophy,which is “Keeping the Diversity of the Species and Form Harmonious Co-existence between Human and Nature.” Next,based on the ecosophy,on the one hand,we find that the material clauses,relational clauses as well as existential process contain unecological factors.From the analysis of the language itself,we find that the material process clauses often omit the agents,and the relational process clauses and existential process clauses always focus on the issue itself and neglect the process of the action and the generating process of the phenomenon of global warming.Meanwhile,from the perspective of the focusing point,we find that in the selected news reports,they mainly focus on environmental problem itself while paying insufficient attention to other plants,species and the causes and solutions of ecological environmental problems.This is not beneficial for people to form the concept and behavior of protecting the ecological environment.This is reflected in the news reports in all types of process clauses.Then,on the level of explanation,the role of language in society is mainly analyzed.On the one hand,language reflects social reality and on the other hand,language constructs social reality.Different expressions have different meanings.This study contains certain of theoretical and practical significance.Theoretically,this paper conducted an ecological analysis of discourse in environmental news under the guidance of Fairclough's three-dimensional analysis framework.The applicability of the framework was enhanced.Moreover,the research methods of eco-discourse analysis were also enriched.At the practical level,this research is conducive to enhancing people's awareness of environmental protection,so as to help people to form the viewpoint of protecting the whole ecosystem.