Eco-critical Discourse Analysis In The English Nature Documentaries

In recent years,due to blind and excessive human production,ecological environment has been seriously broken and ecological crisis has become increasingly serious.With the increasing severity of global ecological environment,people have begun to pay attention to ecological issues.As a new branch of linguistics,eco-critical discourse analysis has emerged and attracted more and more attention from scholars and experts.The current study focuses on the critical analysis of nature documentaries with the aim of revealing the anthropocentrism hidden in the texts and raising people's critical thinking for videos and environmental awareness.Based on Fairclough's three-dimensional analysis model and Halliday's transitivity system,this study uses UAM Corpus Tool 3.3 as the tool and selects two BBC nature documentaries on the theme of marine plastic pollution from 2016 to2019 as corpus,to describe the transitivity features of the nature documentaries,to interpret the anthropocentrism hidden in these chosen texts,to explain the relationship between nature documentaries and society.This study aims to answer three questions:(1)What are the transitivity features of nature documentaries A Plastic Ocean and Drowning in Plastic?(2)How is anthropocentrism embodied through the transitivity features?(3)What is the relationship between nature documentaries and society?The following conclusions are drawn based on the analysis of the two nature documentaries.(1)At the descriptions stage,in the process of analyzing the chosen nature documentaries,the transitivity features are embodied in six different process types.Among these six process types,the material clauses followed by relational clauses and mental clauses account for the largest proportion,which are nearly half of the whole clauses,while the existential clauses,behavioral clauses and verbal clauses are respectively less than the above three.What's more,the four main participants functioning as subjects are people,plastics,experts and adventurers,marine animals.(2)At the interpretation stage,it is revealed that the anthropocentrism is hidden behind material,relational and existential clauses.The reason is that the responsible agents can be left out in the material clauses and the phenomena of plastic crisis are emphasized while the deep reasons of these phenomena are disregarded in relationalclauses and existential clauses.(3)At the explanation stage,it mainly explains the relationship between nature documentaries and society.On the one hand,it is the social factors that determine the appearance of nature documentaries in society.On the other hand,nature documentaries are beneficial to arouse human beings' awareness of environmental protection and construct harmonious ecological society.Therefore,it is necessary to use some environmental friendly terms to reconstruct the relationship between human beings and nature.This study broadens the discourse types of eco-critical discourse analysis,and it can make the future researchers better understand the theory of ECDA.In addition,it is beneficial to awaken people's ecological consciousness.