An Ecological Discourse Analysis Of English Marine Documentaries

With the aggravation of ecological problems and the enhancement of people's ecological consciousness,there has been an ecological turn in scientific research,including the linguistic studies.Michael Halliday believes that we can use language to construct our world.Therefore,language could play an important role in alleviating the current ecological crisis.Among many linguistic theories devoted to ecological research,Ecological Discourse Analysis(EDA)has developed its own research paradigm.This thesis intends to conduct EDA on two English documentaries relating to marine environment(Oceans from BBC and Big Fish Texas from NGC),attempting to reveal the ecological attitudes hiding behind their language.Three close-related questions are going to be discussed:(1)How are the ecological attitudes delivered through linguistic devices?(2)Which one of the two documentaries has a more positive ecological significance? And how is this more positive ecological significance realized?This thesis proposes an instantiated theoretical framework for ecological discourse analysis,which consists of three strata: meaning potential,interface and linguistic instance.In the meaning potential stratum,based on Huang Guowen(2017)'s ecological philosophy,this thesis demonstrates a criterion for harmonious and ideal ecological ideology(i.e.the assumption of people orientedness,and the principles of proximity,consciousness and regulation).In the linguistic instance stratum,transitivity system is employed to investigate the speakers' linguistic devices.To build a connection between the linguistic devices and the underlying ecological meanings,a geographic concept“Sense of Place”(SOP)is metaphorically placed between the linguistic instance stratumand the meaning potential stratum.SOP expounds the connections from three perspectives: the responsible role of human participants,the aspects of nature being focused on in the language,and the types of sense that human participants generate towards nature.On account of this theoretical basis,qualitative and quantitative methods are integrated in the EDA practice.First,the linguistic features are scrutinized in terms of process and participant types;then,the Ecological Sense of Place of the two documentaries are discussed;and finally,ecological scores are calculated based on the above procedures to exhibit the ecological tendencies of the two documentaries.In this context,qualitative and quantitative methods are integrated to conduct an ecological discourse analysis of the BBC documentary Oceans and the NGC documentary Big Fish Texas.The transitivity system and Ecological Sense of Place are particularly investigated to reveal the ecological tendencies of the two documentaries,and thus to explore the interactions between linguistic devices and ecological meanings.Based on the analysis,the following conclusions are drawn:(1)ecological attitudes of the language can be interpreted through ecological discourse analysis on the transitivity system and the ecological sense of place.(2)BBC's Oceans bears a more positive ecological significance than NGC's Big Fish Texas.The more positive ecological significance is realized through the choice of linguistic devices,which can be explained from the following aspects.First,in terms of process types,Big Fish Texas contains more Material processes,Relational-possessive processes and Mental-desideration processes than Oceans to push the flow of events and to claim for ownership on and demands from the nature.In contrast,Oceans prefers Relational-attributive process,Relational-identifying process and Mental-cognition process and Behavioral process,whereby the identifications and characteristics of the marine environments are presented,alongside with the knowledge and understandings of the surroundings.Second,as for the distribution of participant types,human participants and their actions and behaviors take the largest proportions in Big Fish Texas,while Oceans involves more marine lives and natural entities as participants.Big Fish Texas uses more human participants as Agent to initiate Material process and as Possessor to claim for the ownership over nature than Oceans.As for the Marine organism as participants,Big Fish Texas tends to put them on the positions of beingaffected and being possessed,while Oceans treats marine lives as the targets to be characterized,identified and understood.Thirdly,the analysis of the Ecological Sense of Place indicates that human beings mostly serve as risk managers who are responsible for the sustainable development in Oceans,while serve mostly as risk gainers who are born to obtain benefits from nature in Big Fish Texas.In terms of the types of place that is being focused,Oceans gives most of its attentions to non-human organisms and natural places,while Big Fish Texas cares more about social and social-natural places.With regard to the types of sense,Oceans prefers to express understandings towards the surroundings through discourse of cognition,while Big Fish Texas prefers to convey conative behaviors through discourse of conation.And finally,the ecological scores also prove that Oceans delivers a more beneficiary ecological meaning than Big Fish Texas.Generally speaking,Oceans exhibits a stronger sense of belonging to the surroundings than Big Fish Texas;the latter one regards marine environment as available resources and human beings has the absolute control and dominance over nature.This thesis is expected to contribute theoretically to the application of the transitivity within the paradigm of EDA and thus can be envisaged as an extension of EDA.Practically,the thesis is expected to offer a critical point of view for the audience to appreciate the ecological documentary and meanwhile serves as a reminder for documentary producers to publicize an ecological attitude conveyed in their works.In a word,it is expected to alert all of us to think,speak,and act ecolinguistically.