| In the last few decades,natural environments across the world have experienced significant changes under increased pressure from human activity.There is growing concern on environmental problems,which promotes the emergency of ecolinguistics.In Stibbe(2015a:1),he pointed out that “Ecolinguistic discourse analysis examines the influence of language on the life sustaining relationships of humans with each other,with other organisms,and with the natural environment.” Besides,Stibbe(2015b)introduced the ecosophy of “Living!” which is the pursuit of sustainability between the human and human,human and environment.As a part of the ecolinguistics,ecological discourse analysis focuses on the discourse which has influence on the way human interact with each other,other species and the environment.(Alexander & Stibbe,2014)The Appraisal Theory was developed by Martin in the 1990 s on the basis of interpersonal function,which can be seen as an extension of Systemic Functional Linguistics of Halliday.It attempts to model language’s ability to express and negotiate opinions and attitudes within a text.The Appraisal Theory comprises three subcategories: Attitude,Engagement and Graduation.However,few ecological discourse analysis studies take the Appraisal Theory as theoretical foundation.Hence,this study analyzes the attitudinal resources employed in Chinese and Australian greenhouse gas emissions news from the perspective of ecological discourse analysis.First,53 pieces of news released from December of 2015 to June of 2019 are selected from the mainstream media in China and Australia,namely China Daily and Australia Broadcasting Corporation,with a total number of 30,000words(15,000 words of news for each country).Then the attitudinal resources in the news are annotated under the guidance of the Appraisal Theory and the ecosophy of“Living!”.Finally,based on the statistics obtained with the assistance of the UAM CorpusTool 3.3m,quantitative and qualitative analyses are made in order to reveal the distributions,features and functions of the attitudinal resources in Chinese andAustralian greenhouse gas emissions news.The research aims to answer the following three questions:(1)How do the attitudinal resources employed in Chinese and Australian greenhouse gas emissions news distribute and realize?(2)What are the features of the attitudinal resources employed in Chinese and Australian greenhouse gas emissions news?(3)What are the functions of the attitudinal resources employed in Chinese and Australian greenhouse gas emissions news?It is found that firstly,attitudinal resources are largely employed in Chinese and Australian news,with the total number of 542 and 464 respectively.In both Chinese and Australian news,judgement resources are most frequently used with the percentage of 54.61% and 42.24%.Appreciation resources rank the second,with the proportion of 24.54% and 32.97%.Affect resources are the least one occupying20.85% and 24.78%.Secondly,the features of attitudinal resources are discussed from two aspects,polarity and explicitness.In the news of the two countries,positive attitudinal resources account for a higher proportion,and also the inscribed attitudinal resources exceed the invoked ones.Thirdly,these attitudinal resources in the news mainly realize three functions: reporting the facts of greenhouse gas emissions;building public confidence and establishing national image.This study has following significances.First,it enriches the study of environmental news discourse especially from the perspective of ecological discourse analysis.Second,this study further proves the applicability that the Appraisal Theory can be taken as theoretical foundation in ecological discourse analysis.Third,it is of significance in raising people’s ecological awareness and encouraging people to pursue the sustainability of human and environment. |
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