Eco-Critical Discourse Analysis Of English News Reports On China's Environmental Pollution

With the progress and development of human society,there emerges a certain degree of imbalance between economic development and ecological environment,and linguists attach great importance to the ecological environment.At this moment,Eco-linguistics emerges,aiming to reveal the interaction between language and environment by analyzing the ecological and non ecological factors in language.As a new branch of Eco-linguistics,Eco-discourse analysis mainly analyzes the ecological and non-ecological features of language and the ideology behind language,so as to remind us to build a language system conducive to ecological harmony.Eco-critical discourse analysis,which injects ecological elements into critical discourse analysis,analyzes relevant discourse through multi-dimensional methods,aiming to reveal the non-ecological ideology and the power ideology contained in the discourse,so as to improve the readers' Eco-critical consciousness.At present,Eco-discourse research mainly focuses on the discourse analysis of hotel publicity,political speech,advertising discourse and environmental protection manual,and few scholars carry out Eco-critical discourse analysis on the news discourse of environmental pollution to study the non-ecological factors and the interest orientation behind the environmental news discourse.Based on the theoretical framework of Fairclough's three-dimensional analysis model and analytical tool of Halliday's Systemic-Functional Grammar,this paper adopts the qualitative research method to make an Eco-critical discourse analysis from the three aspects of text description,discourse practice interpretation and social interpretation after choosing 16 news reports with the theme of China's environmental pollution from The New York Times and The Washington Post as the corpus.This paper aims to answer the following questions:(i)What kind of language strategies are used to describe environmental pollution?(ii)What kinds of non-ecological consciousness has been displayed in the American media's news reports on China's environmental pollution?(iii)what ideology does the American media hide when reporting on China's environmental pollution and What are the social and political reasons behind it?It is found that American media-The New York Times and The Washington Post adopts many language strategies such as lexical choice,modality system and transitivity system to describe the environmental pollution in China.American media tends to use exaggerated and negative words to describe China's non-ecological environmental pollution and allude to the Chinese government's irresponsible behavior in the face of environmental pollution,thus shaping a relatively negative image of China.These false reports on China's environmental pollution are all due to the US's fear that the country's competitiveness will be threatened by China.As an exploration of Eco-critical discourse analysis of news discourse on environmental pollution,this study helps readers to think critically and interpret the ecological or non ecological elements in the text systematically and objectively,and further to cultivate the public's awareness of analyzing ecological discourse objectively and rationally and protectingthe ecological environment of language.