A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis Of BBC News Reports On Environmental Protection(2017-2019)

In recent years,environmental pollution is becoming more and more serious,and it is urgent to protect the environment.As one of the important approaches to leading social opinions,news media make the best of their unique advantages,and gradually become an important channel to propagandize the concept of environmental protection.As the representative of the mainstream media in the UK,BBC News has published a great number of news reports on environmental protection and plays an important role in appealing to readers to pay attention to and participate in environmental protection.The study of BBC news reports on environmental protection could provide an important revelation of enhancing the environmental awareness of the public and creating a favorable atmosphere of social opinions.Taking the theory of linguistic and visual representations put forward by Hart as the theoretical framework,this study makes a multimodal critical discourse analysis of BBC news reports on environmental protection from 2017 to 2019.By analyzing how BBC news reports on environmental protection represent the identities and social actions of environmentalists as well as the mystification of polluters,this thesis explores the real intentions of relevant news reports.This thesis aims to improve people's understanding of news reports and enhance people's critical awareness.This study mainly applies social actor analysis,transitivity analysis and mystification analysis in the theory of linguistic and visual representations to data analysis.Hart points out two ways of representing the identities of social actors,namely,collectivization and personalization.Collectivization means that social actors are depicted as a particular group and the functions of the group in the social event are highlighted.Personalization means that social actors are described as distinct individuals,and the emphasis is put on their personal influence on the social event?Hart,2014:34?.Transitivity in Critical Discourse Analysis is a broader concept.By describing the analyzed event or situation as specific types of processes,transitivity analysis can be used to explore different social actions reflected by different types of processes and the real purposes of the social actions.Transitivity connects semiotic resources with entities in the world and analyzes the interactions between them?ibid:22?.By analyzing the implied or hidden information,mystification analysis aims to interpret the discourse's real purposes of hiding the information.At the linguistic level,mystification is mainly achieved by the passive voice and nominalization.At the visual level,omitting circumstantial information is helpful to achieve the mystification of images?ibid:30-31?.This thesis adopts qualitative research method as the main analytical method and quantitative research method as the auxiliary method to make an analysis of BBC news reports on environmental protection.Altogether 89 news reports on environmental protection have been collected from January 1^st,2017 to December 31^st,2019 on the official website of BBC News.Among them,51 news reports which have at least three images and relevant texts are selected as the data.This thesis aims to address the following three questions:?1?How are the identities of environmentalists represented in BBC news reports on environmental protection??2?How are the social actions of environmentalists represented in the data??3?How is the mystification of polluters represented in the data?The findings are as follows:?1?In BBC news reports on environmental protection,the masses who are enthusiastic about environmental protection are usually collectivized and depicted as specific groups.Relevant news reports concentrate on the groups'functions in environmental protection to illustrate that environmental protection has got extensive attention.For professionals in environmental protection,relevant news reports personalize their identities and highlight their own functions in environmental protection so as to call on more people to participate in environmental protection.?2?Transitivity analysis has strong explanatory power in the representation of environmentalists'social actions.In BBC news reports on environmental protection,four types of processes in transitivity system are more common,namely,material process?54.14%?,relational process?20.92%?,verbal process?16.91%?and mental process?5.57%?.Material process can be used to show specific environmental actions of environmentalists and provide examples for people to follow in environmental protection.Environmentalists'judgement on the future of the environment is presented by relational process.By presenting the deteriorating trend of the environment,relevant news reports aim to remind people that environmental protection is extremely urgent.Verbal process is helpful to state environmental conditions.By representing environmentalists'opinions about environmental protection,it enhances the reliability of the news reports and calls on more people to pay attention to environmental protection.Environmentalists'concern for the environment is expressed with the aid of mental process,which contributes to making people realize the importance of environmental protection.?3?Two ways of representing the mystification of polluters are found in the data.One is implying the information of polluters in the context,the other is omitting the information of polluters.By implying the information of polluters in the context,the news reports lay emphasis on the illustration of environmental actions and conceal the responsibilities of pollutes at some degree,so as to avoid arousing the readers'dissatisfaction with the polluters.By omitting the information of polluters,the news reports aim to clarify that environmental pollution is not restricted to a specific area,but widely exists around the world.This study has some practical significance.First,the theory of linguistic and visual representations put forward by Hart could improve people's understanding of news reports and enhance their critical awareness.Second,this research is helpful for people to understand and apply the theory of linguistic and visual representations.Third,this thesis can be taken for reference in English reading and writing.In English reading,by analyzing linguistic and visual representations,it is helpful for students to understand the author's intentions.In English writing,students can use different ways to represent social events to achieve different writing purposes.Due to the limited research time and the inadequate competence of the author,this study still has some limitations.First,all the data in this thesis are collected from BBC News,whose topics of environmental protection cover climate,land,water and so on.There is a lack of systemic studies on a particular environmental problem.Second,this thesis analyzes BBC news reports on environmental protection from the perspectives of the identities of environmentalists,environmentalists'social actions and the mystification of polluters.The explanation of relevant news reports'real intentions from the above three perspectives is not comprehensive enough.Finally,although the author tries to keep an objective standpoint in the analysis process,it is hard to avoid the influence of some subjective factors.For further research,the author comes up with the following three suggestions.First,researchers could continually collect the data of a certain environmental problem from different media and make a deeper analysis.Second,researchers should consider applying more linguistic theories to multimodal critical discourse analysis so as to make a more comprehensive analysis of news reports on environmental protection.Finally,in the analysis process,researchers could enlarge the proportion of quantitative analysis so as to improve the objectivity of the research.