Abstract
With the rapid development of our economy, the ecology issues are becoming more and more important. In order to raise people’s ecological awareness, I conducted this empirical study on the transitivity analysis of a story (Our Way of Life Is Piling Pressure on Ecosystems) from the website of the United Nations Environment Programme. By analysing and comparing the distribution and percentage of different transitivity process in this story, what we can find are:1) the main processes are material process (60.9%) and relational process (21.7%), followed by the behavioural process (8.7%), verbal process (4.3%), and existential process (4.3%); 2) most of the more-than-human beings influenced by human beings are in the passive position, and few of them are in the positive position; 3) no matter what position the more-than-human beings are in, they are always the victims of human beings’ activity. Based on the above findings, this story can be regarded as a beneficial discourse, and we should promote and spread it as it can encourage people to protect environment.
Highlights
Nowadays, we are facing with great challenges of environmental problems
By analysing and comparing the distribution and percentage of different transitivity process in this story, what we can find are:1) the main processes are material process (60.9%) and relational process (21.7%), followed by the behavioural process (8.7%), verbal process (4.3%), and existential process (4.3%); 2) most of the more-than-human beings influenced by human beings are in the passive position, and few of them are in the positive position; 3) no matter what position the more-than-human beings are in, they are always the victims of human beings’ activity
In the following part, I will focus on analysing the material and relational process one by one to learn how they represent the experiential meaning of the story
Summary
We are facing with great challenges of environmental problems. Many disciplines are trying to contribute their efforts to this issue. Ecolinguistics research can be done from three perspectives: discourse analysis, applied linguistics, and theoretical linguistics (Huang, 2017:2). My research will try to cover that niche through applying the transitivity analysis from the Systematic Functional Grammar to interpret an ecological discourse form the United Nations Environment Programme (UN Environment). This research is going to solve the following research questions:1) What and how many processes is this story made of ? By answering this two research questions, this research aims to 1) better understand the UN Environment’s standpoint and hidden values by analysing the discourse of the UN Environment; 2) tell what kind of discourse type (beneficial discourse, ambivalent discourse, and destructive discourse) the story is and adopt the proper attitude towards it according to Sttibe’s standards (2015); 3) enrich the empirical studies in this field This research is going to solve the following research questions:1) What and how many processes is this story made of ? 2) How does each process distribute in this story? By answering this two research questions, this research aims to 1) better understand the UN Environment’s standpoint and hidden values by analysing the discourse of the UN Environment; 2) tell what kind of discourse type (beneficial discourse, ambivalent discourse, and destructive discourse) the story is and adopt the proper attitude towards it according to Sttibe’s standards (2015); 3) enrich the empirical studies in this field
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