| In recent years,owning to the high-speed development of human society,human beings have made impressive progress in economy,science and technology.However,in the meantime,some passive problems have been brought about,such as the rapid population growth,serious environmental pollution,massive loss of biodiversity as well as the extinction of rare species and so on.The serious deterioration of the environment has attracted the attention of the masses and environmentalist.In the area of linguistics,a large amount of scholars are also intending to conserve the ecological environment through language.As an significant tool for studying environmental discourse,ecological critical discourse analysis seeks to discover how to conserve the ecological environment through the power of language.In view of this,this thesis,taking Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar and Fairclough’s three-dimensional critical discourse analysis model as the theoretical framework,and taking plastic pollution as an example,selects 40 corpora on environmental news from 2020 to 2021 from the official websites of China Daily and CNN(Cable News Network).The thesis primarily discusses the news reports from three sides:(1)In the description level,the thesis utilizes the transitivity system of systemic-functional linguistics to specifically analyze the linguistic features of the selected news reports,mainly from the angel of lexical selection and transitivity;(2)In the interpretation level,this thesis mainly makes a comparative analysis on how are transitivity features applied in the environmental news reports about plastic pollution between China and America;(3)In the explanation level,it primarily analyzes the reasons for the differences of language features in Chinese and American news discourse and how language affects human cognition of ecological protection,mainly involving the relationship between language choice and ecological civilization.The research mainly includes three research questions:(1)What are the transitivity features and lexical choices contained in such Chinese and American news texts about plastic pollution?(2)How are the transitivity features of such Chinese and American news discourse about plastic pollution presented?(3)At the linguistic level,what are the similarities and differences between such Chinese and American news reports and the reasons for the differences?By analyzing the selected news discourse,there are huge disparities in language features and and the application of language features between China Daily and CNN.In the description stage,both Chinese and American news discourse report news discourse by the use of transitivity features.Among them,material processes are responsible for the vast majority,followed by relational processes and verbal processes.Besides,mental processes and behavioral processes appear least in the text.The existential process does not appear in these two kinds of text.In the interpretation stage,by discussing the common points and disparities of transitivity features in these two kinds of news reports on plastic pollution,it can be seen that Chinese news reports put more emphasis on the status of human beings on the earth.Among the selected news reports,American news reports use more relational clauses.Compared with Chinese news reports,American news reports tend to describe the severity of plastic pollution.In the explanation stage,the main causes for the disparities between Chinese and American environmental news reports are the disparities in writing techniques and social and cultural differences.The American news reports convey information with the utterance of individuals.The Chinese news reports mainly convey information with the utterance of government.Social background culture affects language,and language affects social environment. |
