Exploring Attitudes toward Ecology through Documentaries

Abstract

The expanding development of the world economy has triggered various approaches to address the impending environmental problems, among which documentary serves as one of the most effective and attractive ways to cultivate eco-harmony awareness. This article aims to probe how attitudinal resources are being distributed and what Sino-British ideologies have conveyed in the Chinese documentary, Wild China, and the British documentary, Climate Change: The Facts, under the framework of appraisal theory with the help of UAM CorpusTool 3.3. The results from this study indicate that Wild China tends to employ more dis/inclination resources to show that China is willful to collaborate with other countries for environmental protection. On the other hand, the United Kingdom (UK) tends to adopt dis/satisfaction resources to explicitly or implicitly convey their disagreement with the promotion of the economy under the cost of the environment. The appraisal resources employed by both documentaries convey the ideology of opposing humans’ over-exploitation of natural resources. The findings of this study have both theoretical and practical implications in enriching the application of appraisal theory on the analysis of ecological discourse and further encourage the world to take action in order to prevent the over-exploitation of natural resources.