| Nowadays,global climate change has become a serious challenge faced by humanity.Therefore,the text of climate change has attracted more and more attention.The official website of news,as a new form of media for disseminating information and guiding public opinion,has also become a main way for people to understand global climate change.According to related literature,there are many studies on climate change text from the perspective of genre.However,most of them focus on the function of language resource in the generic structure and there are few studies on multimodal genres.This thesis adopts the research methods of comparative research,quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis on 31 texts selected from China Daily and 27 climate change texts from The New York Times in 2019.From the perspective of multimodal semiotics,it explores the generic features of Chinese and American climate change texts in three aspects,namely content,form and function.On this basis,the study discusses how Chinese and American climate change text,as a form of discourse,participate in social practice and express meaning from the semiotic resources such as actors,places and images involved in the selected texts.The study finds that there are many similarities in the content of climate change texts in China Daily and The New York Times.However,China Daily attaches importance to China’s positive attitude in participating in the governance of global climate change and calls on humans to pay attention to climate change;The New York Times pays attention to the negative events caused by climate change.In terms of form,the two media use various multimodal semiotic resources such as language and images,but The New York Times also tends to use the hyperlink semiotic resource to help readers to extend reading.Because of the use of image and hyperlink semiotic resources,the traditional “beginning-middle-end” linear generic structure based on the language semiotic resource can no longer fully adapt to the genre in the new media era.In terms of function,both China Daily and The New York Times realize the function of disseminating climate knowledge,warning readers of the harm caused by climate change and persuading readers to take action to deal with climate change.Besides,as a form of discourse,climate change discourses published in the two media have different implied meanings from the analysis of semiotic resources such as actors and images included in the selected texts.China Daily also shows China’s image as a responsible country that actively governs climate change and promotes win-win cooperation;but,The New York Times also reflects opinions,contradictions and conflicts of different interest owners. |
