Ecological Discourse Analysis Of The Commentary Of Marine Documentaries From The Perspective Of Transitivity System

The ecological turn in the field of humanities and social science contributes to the development of ecolinguistics.As one of the main research approaches in ecolinguistics,Ecological Discourse Analysis(EDA)focuses on investigating the interrelationship between language and ecology.Marine ecology is closely related to the earth’s ecosystem.Marine documentaries can show the real marine environments,and conducting EDA on the commentary of marine documentaries contributes to explore the impact of language use on marine ecology.The following research questions are expected to be addressed in this thesis:(1)What are the general distribution characteristics of processes,participants and places in the commentary of marine documentaries?(2)What ecological meanings does the commentary of marine documentaries convey through the dimensions of processes,participants and places?(3)What are the practical suggestions for discourse creation in ecological documentaries in terms of transitivity resources and place focus?This study adopts quantitative and qualitative research methods to analyze the commentary texts transcribed from two English marine documentaries,i.e.,Seaspiracy and Blue Planet II.UAM Corpus Tool 3.3 is employed to annotate each clause to get the general distribution of each dimension.With the guidance of ecosophy,the ecological meanings implied in the data are discussed with specific examples,and the influence of language use on ecology is investigated.The main findings of the study are as follows: Firstly,in the aspect of distribution characteristics,material processes and relational processes account for the largest proportion of the data.Human participants frequently serve as the Actor and the Carrier in the text of Seaspiracy,while non-human participants are frequently assigned as the Actor and the Carrier in Blue Planet II.In addition,Seaspiracy focuses more on social places,and Blue Planet II pays more attention to natural places.Secondly,in terms of the conveyed ecological meanings,it is concluded that the commentary of both documentaries propagates eco-beneficial thoughts.The former discloses the invasion of the oceans by human beings and the facts regarding commercial fishing.Humans superficially obtain enormous wealth but eventually become risk losers.And a negative sense is generated towards such social places as fishing fleets and fisheries,etc.The latter presents the actions and movements of various marine creatures.It increases humans’ understanding of marine ecology.And a positive sense is produced towards all the seas and the relevant marine life on the earth.Thirdly,in the matter of ecological discourse creation,eco-beneficial discourse can be created not only through using material processes to directly uncover the damage caused by human beings to natural ecology,but also indirectly through using relational processes to describe the close relationship between natural ecology and humans’ development.Meanwhile,mental processes with non-human organisms as the Senser can shorten the psychological distance between them and human beings.This study enriches the analytical dimensions of transitivity ecological discourse analysis,extending the eco-oriented analysis of the participant roles and ecological places.Furthermore,the ecological discourse analysis of the commentary of environmental documentaries contributes to promoting eco-beneficial discourse and arousing people’s ecological awareness,which is conducive to ecological civilization construction.