An Ecological Discourse Analysis of the Report of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China

Abstract

The environmental issues are becoming more prominent nowadays, and there is a dawning realization of maintaining the harmony between men and nature. The way human think about the relationships with the nature and other organisms has shifted gradually. Meanwhile, the “ecological turn” is relatively remarkable in all aspects. As a new cross-discipline formed by the combination of ecology and linguistics, Eco-linguistics mainly studies the influence of language use on human beings, environment and other organisms. This paper chiefly uses the mode of systemic functional linguistics theory proposed by Halliday to analyze the ecological discourse of the reports of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China. In order to carry out the study, the ecological philosophy (for short as ecosophy) of this paper draws from Chinese traditional philosophy and theory of sense of place. To sum up, guided by the proposed theoretical foundation, this study makes an ecological interpretation of the selected text, so that the ecological meaning expressed in discourse can be presented more intuitively by discourse researchers and reasonable evaluation of ecological value of discourse can be carried out in the further practice.