| Climate change caused by intensified human activities has become a common problem in recent decades.Most countries have determined the target of emission peak and carbon neutrality to cope with this problem,making these two-word groups popular in recent years.However,there are few studies on ecological discourse comparison of news reports about emission peak and carbon neutrality at home and abroad.Therefore,this thesis combines ecolinguistics and systemic functional grammar to compare the lexical,semantic,and transitivity in Chinese and American media news reports about emission peak and carbon neutrality,to reveal the hidden ecological views.The current researcher selected 55 news reports on emission peak and carbon neutrality from China Daily and The New York Times from September 22,2020,to the end of April 2022,the searching keywords are emission peak,carbon neutrality,and climate change,and built two small corpora with a total of about 50,000 words,and used the corpus analysis software WordSmith Tool 8.0 to analyze the data.The research results are as follows:Firstly,when comparing and analyzing the semantic and lexical of high-frequency words in the two corpora,the current researcher finds the two media both focus on using verbal process clauses guided by said directly quoting the discourse from officials or experts,which indicates that the reports on emission peak and carbon neutrality in the two countries tend to describe facts objective and authoritative.Chinese and American media prefers to use the words like crisis and catastrophe when describing climate change which is more suggestive of the seriousness of climate change than the neutral use of the word change.The current researcher also found a difference in the use of transitive verbs in news reports between the two countries:China Daily prefers the verb achieve,while The New York Times prefers the verb reach when referring to carbon targets.This finding also confirms that transitivity is a series of choices.The choice and use of the transitivity system are directly related to the cognition degree and cognition way of the objective and the subjective world.Therefore,the choice of verbs reflects the different levels of commitment of the two countries’ media to the goal of carbon neutrality,which will further affect the progress of humans solve the climate problem.Secondly,the current researcher finds similarities in the ecological views of the two corpora:the two countries have a high degree of consensus in addressing the climate issue.These have laid the foundation for mutual understanding,communication,and cooperation between the two countries on this issue.The differences are that:(a)emission peak and carbon neutrality are both opportunities and challenges for China.It gains widespread support in China.That will accelerate the realization of China’s carbon goals.(b)The media in America quote the analysis and comments from authorities to supervise the climate policy issued by the government,but it is hard to obtain widespread support.The American government takes carbon neutrality as a political measure to balance all parts of relations.It may affect the process of solving climate change.To sum up,through ecological discourse comparison of the lexical,semantic,and transitivity features of the news discourse about emission peak and carbon neutrality in Chinese and American media,this study has practical significance for revealing the hidden ecological view in the reports of these two media. |
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