An Ecological Discourse Analysis Of Biodiversity Conservation TED Talks From The Perspective Of Transitivity System

Since the 20 th century,with the rapid development of human society,the ecological environment has been seriously damaged,which has triggered a series of global ecological issues.Therefore,more and more scholars are committed to looking at the world from the perspective of ecology,and ecolinguistics is a new discipline developed in this context.Halliday model(1990)mainly focuses on the role of language in ecological problems,and Systemic Functional Linguistics(SFL)emphasizes the description and analysis of linguistic facts to construct reality.Thus,this study attempts to conduct an ecological discourse analysis on 30 biodiversity conservation TED Talks from the perspective of transitivity system,aiming at revealing the ecological thoughts behind the linguistic resources.Three questions will be addressed in this study:(1)How is transitivity system distributed in the biodiversity conservation TED Talks?(2)How is transitivity system realized in the biodiversity conservation TED Talks?(3)What kind of ecological thoughts are constructed through transitivity system in biodiversity conservation TED Talks? Accordingly,this study conducts an ecological discourse analysis of 30 biodiversity conservation TED Talks under the theoretical framework of transitivity system with the aid of UAM Corpus tool 3.3 by adopting both quantitative and qualitative methods.The major findings can be described from the following three parts.First,regarding the distribution of transitivity system,the proportion of Process,Participant and Circumstance is different,among which Participant accounts for the highest proportion.Material process is the most commonly applied one compared with other processes.As for the distribution of Participant,human organism,non-human organism and physical participants are more frequently used.Second,in terms of the realization of transitivity system,Material processes mainly describe the practical actions taken by human beings to protect biodiversity as well as the true life of other species in nature;Relational processes show the attributes of some animals,plants and physical environment;Behavioral processes mainly describe human’s behavior when facing other creatures;Mental processes illustrate different mental activities of human organisms;Verbal processes are mainly about human speech activities;Existential processes show us the current situation of other species.Finally,with respect to the ecological thoughts contained in biodiversity conservation TED talks,the view of biocentric equality is reflected by means of personifying and humanizing those non-human organisms and physical participants.And the thought of Self-realization is expressed through recognizing and respecting rights and values of all life-forms in nature.This study is expected to provide a new research path in the field of Ecological Discourse Analysis from the perspective of transitivity system and provide the audience another way to appreciate those TED Talks,which may help humans further realize the significance of protecting biodiversity and thus can encourage them to think,speak and act in an ecologically responsible way.