A Study Of The Transitivity System In The Discourses Of English Textbook "New Concept English" From The Perspective Of Eco-linguistics

Transitivity system is a semantic system in the ideational meta-function.It divides all the human experiences in real life into several processes and characterizes people's experience activities through three components of the clauses' process types,participants and circumstance respectively.Early researchers choose to use critical discourse analysis to explore hidden ecological ideologies in the transitivity system.However,few studies use ecological discourse analysis and focus on the transitivity system in other genres of discourses except news from the perspective of eco-linguistics to unveil its hidden ecological minds.Based on this,this study will analyze the transitivity system in the English textbook “New Concept English” from the perspective of eco-linguistics.This study will be on basis of the transitivity system theory in the ideational meta-function of systemic functional linguistics,holding a calibrated ruler of ecosophy which is combined by the traditional Chinese ecological philosophy and western ecosophy of ecological sense of place as its guidance.The purpose of this paper is to explore the ecological ideologies which are embedded in transitivity system in the text of teaching materials,so as to make people,especially teenagers,pay attention to the use of language,promote the eco-beneficial discourses,cultivate ecological awareness and then protect the environment.In order to achieve the above research purposes,this study proposes the following two research questions:1.How are the ecological features distributed in the transitivity system in the English textbook “New Concept English”?2.What kind of ecological ideologies can be revealed by analyzing the transitivity system in the English textbook “New Concept English”?In order to answer the above questions,this study randomly selects 50 texts from the authoritative English textbook “New Concept English” and uses it as a small closed corpus.According to the more concrete and detailed transitivity system classification model which is proposed by He Wei and Wei Rong in 2016,the transitivity system of each clause in the corpus will be labeled by artificial recognition.Using the combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods,this study will apply the theoretical framework of ecological discourse analysis which is first pointed out by He wei and Zhang ruijie in 2017 and improved by Zhang ruijie in 2018 to do the analysis in a more precise way.On one hand,this study tries to describe the distribution of ecological features in transitivity system in the corpus.On the other hand,this study will try to explore the hidden ecological ideologies in the transitivity system.The results are listed as follows:Firstly,the transitivity system which can reflect the ecological features in the “New Concept English” accounts for 50.3% of the corpus,and its ecological features are respectively distributed in the three components of the transitivity system,such as participants,process and circumstances.Furthermore,the proportion and the specific expression forms of the ecological features in these three components are different.Secondly,the hidden ecological ideologies in the transitivity system in the “New Concept English” can be divided into three types: eco-beneficial,eco-ambivalent and eco-destructive ideologies.Transitivity system in the “New Concept English” can transfer the eco-beneficial ideologies which are ideologies of protecting nature and showing people's emotion of affection,cognition of similarity and conation of proximity towards the whole nature.The eco-ambivalent ideologies can transfer people's emotion of indifference,the cognition of zero-cognition and the conation of non-action towards the nature.However,the eco-destructive ideologies can transfer the anthropocentrism and the emotion of dislike,cognition of differentiation and the conation of alienation towards nature.Based on the results of this study,linguistics should pay attention to the hidden ecological ideologies in the transitivity system in the English textbook,promoting the eco-beneficial discourses,in order to lead people to cultivate the ecological consciousness of caring for the environment and to protect the environment.