Abstract
Abstract This study adopts an ecolinguistic approach to analyze logical resources in the news reports about the Sino-US trade war collected from the two sources, The Times of Britain and Sputnik News Agency of Russia. By observing the logical system for ecological discourse analysis, the study throws light on the ecological properties and values of the mainstream media between the two stakeholders. The discursive research finds that overall, the Russian news reports appeal for a free trade system, while they talk down the trade truce, and the British news reports, although opposed to protectionism, call for unity with the UK’s ally to avoid tariff risk and earn effortless profits. Hence, the ecological properties of the Russian and British media are complex and mixed. Regarding ecological variance, the two media more or less underwent an ecological shift with the dynamic process of the trade war.
Highlights
The seemingly long-standing harmony between the US and China since the normalization of diplomatic relations was disturbed and broken on March 8, 2018, when the US government, under President Trump’s administration, began a trade war by imposing higher tariffs on the products imported from China
Contrastive studies have rarely been concerned with other countries that are exposed to the widespread effects of trade frictions, and research approaches have generally been limited to the fields of critical discourse analysis (e.g. Wang and Ge 2019), corpus-assisted discourse analysis (e.g. Wang and Xin 2019), multimodal discourse analysis (e.g. Ma and Gao 2020), and cognitive linguistics (e.g. Yan and Zhang 2018)
Drawing on the analytical framework of the ecological logical system, this discursive study is devoted to disclosing ecological properties by exploring the logical resources in news reports on the trade war
Summary
The seemingly long-standing harmony between the US and China since the normalization of diplomatic relations was disturbed and broken on March 8, 2018, when the US government, under President Trump’s administration, began a trade war by imposing higher tariffs on the products imported from China. During the trade war between these two economic superpowers, the mass media worldwide have given extensive coverage to the taxation policies of Cheng and He the two governments, and provided in-depth analyses of and opinions on the causes, ramifications, and future orientations of the trade war. Yan and Zhang 2018) Following this trend, the present study examines the news coverage of the trade war, yet applying a different paradigm, that is, the approach of ecological discourse analysis (hereafter EDA). Since the trade conflict is a consequence of human activities, as well as a long-lasting and dynamic process of the international ecosystem, analyzing discursive realization in news texts from an ecolinguistic perspective helps to clarify the “stories between the lines” that could influence people’s cognition and behaviors (Stibbe 2015). A contrastive study of news coverage can reveal the ecological properties of the relevant third parties, raise people’s ecological awareness in identifying discourses, and improve their ecological behaviors
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