1 Introduction
1.1 Research Background
With the rapid development of modernization and the growing trend of the global economy, human beings seek to maximize the earth for their better living situation. While human beings extract wealth from nature, they have seriously damaged the ecological environment. Ecological crises can be seen everywhere, and human survival has been greatly threatened. The fundamental cause for this current situation is anthropocentrism, which considers human being as the center of the whole ecosystem. This internal ideology in human being is closely related to environmental degradation. In order to change this traditional value, and to establish the eco -centrism consciousness, many regions have begun to implement ecological construction. For instance, green tourism industry and eco-tourism have been flourishing in recent years, which is aiming to minimize the adverse effects of human activities on the natural environment to ensure sustainable use and development of tourism resources.
What’s more, under the background of the remarkable improvement of people’s living standard, people begin to have the ability and energy to travel and sightseeing, which has brought tremendous space for the development of tourism industry in the world. Travel news has become more diverse and the amount of information has increased dramatically. Many TV and newspaper media have set up special tourism columns. In practical application, these measures can better respond to the tourism market, and at the same time, they can also meet the public’s demand for information acquisition in the tourism market, so that the travel news has received extensive attention and attention from all walks of life. From the view of ecology, English travel news, via the form of discourse, not only reports the geographical features, cultural development and other aspects of the world, but also transmits a concept of environmental conservation to readers.
Meanwhile, many branches of social sciences and humanities have kept on adopting the concept of ecology and thus a great variety of multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research paradigms have appeared, such as ecological sociology, ecological culturalology, ecological aesthetics, ecolinguistics and so on. As a new discipline of linguistics, ecolinguistics has emerged in the 1970s. In a narrow sense, ecolinguistics refers to critical ecolinguistics, which includes two sub-categories: one is eco-criticism of the English language system, and the other is eco-critical discourse analysis, which is widely used in the researches on environmental and environmentalism discourse in recent years. It focuses on criticizing the ecological and non -ecological features included in the discourse and explore the relationship between language and ecological environment from different perspectives.
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1.2 Purpose and Significance of the Study
In the last few years, with the increasingly environmental pollution, a majority of people begin to realize the significance of protecting the environment. A great deal of researchers attempt to protect the environment by using the power of language and studying the relationship of language and the environment. Meanwhile, the eco-critical discourse analysis is a newly emerged discipline of the eco-linguistics, it aims to analyze the ecological or non-ecological ideology through the analysis of the discourse. At present, lots of scholars have already analyzed a great variety of discourses including the political speech, news discourse, the advertisements and so forth. By the aid of analyzing the non-ecological factors and the implicit ideology, the scholars hope to remind the mankind to construct a grammar and language system, which embody a harmonious coexistence between the human and the ecological environment. The present study conducts an Eco-critical discourse analysis on 100 English travel news of China Daily by applying Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of discourse analysis. In this study, the different transitive processes and attitude resources in English travel news will be analyzed, with the aim to explain the relationship between language, human and environment, and reveals that the language form adopted in discourse not only to attract more tourists and promote the development of tourism, but also to convey that human beings should implement the ecological sustainability. In the meantime, the following questions will be answered.
(1) What kind of transitive processes is frequently used in reporting the tourism and what function does it have?
(2) Which kind of attitude resource is frequently used at the interpretation level to highlight t he social function of English travel news?
(3) What deep ecological thoughts do the English travel news intend to deliver, and how do they manipulate human beings’ ecological ideology?
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2 Literature Review
2.1 Previous Studies on Eco-critical Discourse Analysis
2.1.1 Previous Studies on Eco-critical Discourse Analysis Abroad
Even before the emergence of ecological critical linguistics, ecolinguists have criticized language used in discourses on the environment, other species of ecosystem and ecological issues. As a new discipline of critical ecolinguistics, eco-critical discourse analysis is a flourishing research field in recent years, and the number of ecological discourses is constantly increasing.
In Fill’s paper, he states that “ecology is applied metaphorically to language(s) in an environment.[3]” Eco-critical discourse analysis draws on the thoughts of modern critical linguistics and analyses the ecological ideology and human activities contained in language from the perspective of ecology. The theme “language and ecological problems” is explored by many linguistics from different levels with dissimilar research methods to cope with the ecological consciousness embodied in the text materials.
When Haugen defined “language ecology” as “the study of interactions between any given language and its environment” in 1970, he took the first step towards an ecological approach to language.[4] Haugen not only describes the indirect factors between language and ecology, but also begins to analyze how these factors affect language and how language feeds back human social activities and psychological environment. Blackledge believed that Haugen saw the value of language ecology models. In this analysis, we need not only to describe the social and psychological state of language, but also to explore its impact on language itself.
Michael Howlett and Rebecca Raglon conducted a diachronic study of 500 printed advertisements in North American popular magazines from 1910 to 1990, which is in Constructing the Environmental Spectacle: Green Advertisements and the Greening of the Corporate Image.[5] They believe that it is nothing new for companies to sell their products by using natural imagery; however, the new situation in the 1990s was that companies would like to establish an environmentally friendly or eco-friendly corporate image.
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2.2 Previous Studies on English Travel News
2.2.1 Previous Studies on English Travel News Abroad
English travel news is a special type of tourism texts. In general, tourism text is a communicative activity among different languages, societies, spaces, cultures and minds.[24] Lots of researchers have written some books and articles to expound their views, which have made great contributions to the development of English travel news. Dane G.M.S. is regarded as the first person to study tourism from a sociolinguistic perspective.[25] Through the analysis of the social function of tourism language, this paper points out that tourism discourse has its own form. He points out that various forms of tourism language try to persuade, entice, courtship and lure people into tourists, and ultimately control their attitudes and behavior. For one thing, the book provides readers with rich knowledge of tourism language, which is helpful for tourists and foreign translators to understand the content of the text more deeply. For another, the book expounds the intrinsic relationship between tourists and tourism language.
The relationship between the travelers and the tourism language is also emphasized by Michael Cronin. He analyses the ways in which language communicates experience across cultures and points out the influence of translator’s status.
Eric Castello follows a systematic-functional approach to describe the language and its structure used in tourist information texts by means of corpus linguistics.[27] He believes that the study of linguistic features such as lexical density and grammatical complexity is conducive to the quantitative analysis in texts. His research also shows that language structure analysis is a key point in adaptation theory and its importance should not be underestimated. In the meantime, it can inspire people to study tourism from a practical point of view.
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3 理论框架 ..................................... 14
3.1 Fairclough 的三维分析模式 ............................... 14
3.1.1 描述 ....................................... 14
3.1.2 阐释 ................................... 15
4 研究方法 ........................................ 26
4.1 研究问题 ...................................... 26
4.2 研究对象及工具 .................................. 26
5 分析与讨论 .......................................... 34
5.1 描述阶段：及物性分析 ............................... 34
5.1.1 英语旅游新闻的及物性特征 .................................. 34
5.1.2 英语旅游新闻及物性特征的案例分析 ....................... 36
5 Analysis and Discussion
5.1 Description Stage: Transitive Analysis
5.1.1 Transitivity Features in English Travel News
In this chapter, by using UAM to analyze the English travel news discourse, we analyze the transitivity analysis, and try to find out how this kind of process was used to convey the ecological meaning in the travel news, from what standpoint and what non-ecological discourse penetrate it. Through the analysis of 100 selected English travel news from the perspective of transitivity system, the results are shown in the figure below.
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6 Conclusion
Chapter Six is the conclusion, which consists of the major findings of the research, limitations of the research and some suggestions for future researches.
As a kind of propaganda discourse, English travel news plays a vital role in establishing the credibility of this kind of news and serves as a window to display the image of the environment. Therefore, it is particularly significant to understand the mechanism of English travel news. From the perspective of transitivity, attitude resources and deep ecological thoughts , this thesis adopts eco-critical discourse analysis to examine the news, so as to reveals how the news interacts and what a system attains the deep comprehensive constructs relations with the people in the particular context. The encouraging findings are summarized as follows:
With regard to transitivity processes in English travel news, material process and relational process are most frequently employed, which is determined by its linguistic features. In order to highlight their informative function, the English travel news should convey the efforts or actions of this form in speech to protect the environment and describe how tourists come into close encounters with nature and perceive the beauty of nature, which is embodied by material process. To achiev e their publicity function, the unique location natural environment, quaint cultural heritage and historical enjoyment of science spot will be rendered, which is delivered by relational process.
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