| In recent years,people pay more and more attention to the changes of the ecological environment.With the continuous development of human society,we have made great progress in science,technology,and economy.However,a series of negative problems,such as environmental deterioration and air pollution,are gradually highlighted."Lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets",ecological protection becomes particularly important.With the exploration and study of the relationship between language and nature,eco-linguistics emerges as the times require.However,from the perspective of eco-critical discourse analysis,there are only a few studies on the transitivity system in environmental news reports.Based on this situation,from the perspective of eco-critical discourse analysis,this paper uses Fairclough’s three-dimensional analysis model as a framework.It analyzes the transitivity system in environmental news reports.The purpose of this study is to help readers explore the hidden non-ecological thoughts in environmental news discourses.This study aims to answer three questions:(i)What are the distributional patterns of the transitivity system in the corpus?(ii)How are the hidden non-ecological thoughts revealed by analyzing the transitivity system in environmental news reports?(iii)In English environmental news reports,what is the relationship between the transitivity system and the ecological environment?To answer the questions above,this paper selects 20 environmental news reports from 2016 to 2020 in China Daily to form a small closed corpus.According to Halliday’s classification of the transitivity system,this paper uses the corpus software UAM Corpus Tool as the research tool to label the transitivity system in the corpus manually.In this study,quantitative and qualitative analysis methods are used.And this paper mainly applies the three-dimensional discourse analysis framework proposed by Fairclough to describe the distribution of the transitivity system in environmental news reports,interpret non-ecological thoughts hidden in environmental news reports,and then explain the relationship between the transitivity system and the ecological environment.The results of this study are shown as follows:first of all,the description stage analyzes the transitivity system,which shows that all the six kinds of transitivity processes appear in the corpus.Among them,there are three kinds of transitivity processes used more frequently:the material process,the verbal process,and the relational process.The material process is used the most,and the number of the material process is over half of all,which accounts for 54.91 percent.The proportion of the verbal process is 21.97 percent,while the relational process accounts for 15.84 percent.The other three types of transitivity processes are the mental process,the existential process,and the behavioral process.Each of them accounts for little proportion.Among them,the existential process accounts for 5.32 percent,while the mental process accounts for only 1.50 percent.As for the behavioral process,it accounts for the lowest of all process types with 0.46 percent.Secondly,by analyzing the transitivity system in detail in the interpretation stage,it can be found that there are some non-ecological thoughts hidden in these processes.For example,the human behavior that causes environmental pollution is often omitted.Finally,based on the analysis in the first two stages,the explanation stage reveals the relationship between the transitivity system and the ecological environment,that is,the transitivity system is a reflection of the actual situation of the ecological environment,and the transitivity system will also affect the construction of ecological civilization.This study has both theoretical and practical significance.Theoretically,the research paradigm of eco-critical discourse analysis and Fairclough’s three-dimensional analysis framework are adopted in this study to analyze the environmental news reports of China Daily.This helps to enrich the research methods of eco-critical discourse analysis.Practically,this study helps people understand the implications of language in environmental news reports and explore the hidden non-ecological thoughts.At the same time,this study also verifies the relationship between the transitivity system and the ecological environment. |
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