An Ecological Discourse Analysis Of English And Chinses Pro-environmental Public Service Advertisements From A Systemic Functional Perspective

Ecolinguistics is a new interdisciplinary discipline developed by combining ecology and linguistics.In recent years,as one of the research directions,ecological discourse analysis(EDA)has attracted widespread attention.It includes both the analysis of ecological discourse and the ecological analysis of any discourse and these two types complement each other.Because the research history of this discipline is not long enough,there is no fixed analysis model and framework,and other research approaches are needed to carry out.According to Halliday(1990),language can create meaning,and it is a medium for constructing reality.People’s words reflect their thoughts and actions.An analysis of the discourse of English and Chinese pro-environmental public service advertisements(PSAs)can find the ecological views behind them,which has aroused people’s ecological attention when using language.Therefore,a comparative analysis of the ecological discourse of English and Chinese pro-environmental PSAs has important theoretical and practical significance.This thesis takes the transitivity system under the system functional grammar as the theoretical framework and makes an EDA of English and Chinese pro-environmental PSAs through self-built closed corpora.Among them,there are 45 English pro-environmental PSAs selected from the official websites of the UN Environment Protection Programme,the U.S.Environmental Protection Agency and the World Wildlife Fund,with a total of 629 clauses.There are 45 Chinese pro-environmental PSAs selected from the Chinese public service advertising website,with a total of 535 clauses.This thesis combines the transitivity system under the systemic functional grammar and makes statistics and labeling from the three perspectives of the process system,participant roles,and the reconstructed process system to obtain the distribution of English and Chinese pro-environmental PSAs in these three aspects.Furthermore,this thesis makes a comparative analysis of these data,and draws the following conclusions:First,the main processes in English pro-environmental PSAs discourse are action processes(60.89%),relational processes(21.46%),and mental processes(9.54%).The discourses of Chinese proenvironmental PSAs are mainly action processes(48.8%),relational processes(34.4%),and mental processes(10.1%).This data reflects a similarity between English and Chinese pro-environmental PSAs from the perspective of the process system,both of them express semantic meaning mainly through the action processes.Secondly,in the participant role system,through statistical analysis of the participants which are subjects in clauses,it was found that whether in English pro-environmental PSAs or Chinese pro-environmental PSAs,the proportion of human participants as agents is higher than that of non-human participants,reflecting the existence of anthropocentrism in English and Chinese pro-environmental PSAs.Besides,through an analysis of the reconstructed process system,it is found that there are differences in expressing the ecological significance of English and Chinese pro-environmental PSAs.English proenvironmental PSAs express ecological significance through the action processes,while Chinese pro-environmental PSAs express ecological significance through the mental processes.