An Ecological Discourse Analysis Of Salience And Erasure In The News Reports On Electric Vehicles In China Daily And The New York Times

With the increasing depletion of non-renewable energy sources and the deterioration of the climate worldwide,energy saving and environmental protection has become two major issues that need to be addressed urgently and are gaining more attention from countries around the world.Greenhouse effect is an important cause of climate deterioration.It is mainly caused by the excessive burning of coal,oil and natural gas,which generates and emits a large amount of carbon dioxide gas from automobile exhaust into the atmosphere.The automotive industry,as one of the largest global carbon emitters,is highly dependent on traditional fossil energy sources,and increases the consumption of them,which seriously damages the global ecosystem.Therefore,new concepts such as new energy,low-carbon economy and recycling economy have emerged and gained widespread attention in society.Governments have begun to actively address this issue and encourage the development of electric vehicles(EVs for short).Electric vehicles are powered by clean energy and can effectively reduce the environmental pollution caused by traditional vehicles.Any discourse related to "ecology" and "life sustainability" can be referred to as ecological discourse.Ecological discourse analysis refers to the ecological analysis of discourse from the perspective of linguistics based on a certain ecosophy,with the aim of promoting discourse that is beneficial to the development of ecosystems,improving eco-ambivalent discourse,and resisting eco-destructive discourse.However,few scholars at home and abroad have conducted ecological discourse analysis on eco-discourses on electric vehicles.China Daily and The New York Times are key national news websites,and news reports on electric vehicles released by them are widely distributed and have more credibility.Therefore,60 discourses on electric vehicles published in China Daily and The New York Times from January 2020 to July 2022 are selected as the data for this study.Based on the framework of transitivity system from SFL and the story of salience and erasure from ecolinguistics as well as the ecosophy of "diversity and harmony,interaction and co-existence",with the aid of UAM Corpus Tool 3.3,this study conducts an ecological discourse analysis by combining quantitative and qualitative analysis.Based on the distributional features of the transitivity components,it focuses on analyzing how ecological participants are salient or erased on the development of electric vehicles as well as the eco-orientations these discourses conveyed.This thesis aims to answer the following three questions:1)What are the distributional features of ecological participants in ecological discourses on EVs from China Daily and The New York Times?2)How are ecological participants salient or erased in ecological discourses on EVs from China Daily and The New York Times?3)What ecological orientation is reflected behind ecological participants’salience and erasure?Based on the the data collected,1)we can distinguish the roles of participants involved and finds that among life participants,the most frequent role for human participants is the sayer and the most frequent role consumers play is the actor;as for lifeless participants,most EV-related physicial participants act as goals while most country,government and country participants act as actors.2)Different ecological participants are highlighted and erased to different degrees in China Daily and The New York Times.The salience and erasure of eco-participants are mainly realized through the participant role they play and the process they involve.Nominalization and the transformation from participant roles into circumstances usually mean erasure of some eco-participants.In China Daily,entrepreneurs’ social responsibility to protect the environment as well as their ability for developing the EV industry is highlighted.The government’s contribution to developing the EV industry is also salient.But batteries,raw materials,and the charging infrastructure,which are indispensable for the EV industry,are seldom mentioned and partially erased.In The New York Times,instead of entrepreneurs,president Biden as well as other politicians are highlighted for their support for the EV industry.However,the government is only mentioned for their basic administrative and economic functions,and their other functions are partially erased.Both China Daily and The New York Times do not pay enough attention to consumers,and their initiative and contribution to the development of EVs are seldom mentioned and partially or totally erased.3)In the news reports on EVs from China Daily and The New York Times,the ecological participants’ salience and erasure mainly convey eco-ambivalent orientation,and seldom convey eco-beneficial or eco-destructive orientation.Influenced by the political system and economic interests,China Daily and The New York Times make some eco-participants salient or erased on purpose,and convey different eco-orientations.This thesis intends to provide readers with some reference to interpret the discourses relating to EVs,which is an attempt to solve social problems from the perspective of linguistics.