2.1.1 Ecological Discourse Analysis
EDA stems from the article New ways of meaning: The challenge to appliedlinguistics written by Halliday (1990). He believes that language strengthens ideas such as“anthropocentrism”, which is an important cause of ecological damage. It can be seen thatlanguage can construct reality. Therefore, these factors that violate the ecological harmonyof the language system should be criticized, which becomes the beginning of EDA. Inother words, EDA is closely related to traditional critical discourse analysis (CDA).
Harré (1999) defines EDA as including but not limited to the use of CDA indiscourses related to the environment or environmentalism, aiming at revealing potentialecological or non-ecological ideologies. In discourse analysis, researchers study discourses related to ecological problems, such as environment, animals and plants, food, climate andweather.
Alexander and Stibbe (2014) claims EDA as the study of language and how languageuse affects the ecosystem.
Then, Stibbe (2015) argues that EDA could draw on any applicable linguistic theories,such as systemic functional linguistics and cognitive linguistics. This is also an importantreason why EDA can be interrelated with other discourse analysis, for example CDA andmultimodal discourse analysis (MDA).
2.2 Previous Studies on Ecolinguistics
As a novel discipline, ecolinguistics combines different linguistic theoreticalframeworks, research methods and ecology principles. In terms of Alexander & Stibbe(2014), “ecolinguistics is the study of the impact of language on the life-sustainingrelationships among humans, other organisms and the physical environment. It isnormatively orientated towards preserving relationships which sustain life” (p.105). Inother word, based on the study of the relationship between languages, language system andlanguage use, it tries to solve the ecological problems in language environment, naturalenvironment, social and cultural environment and cognitive psychological environment,then reveals the interaction between language and ecological environment.
The development of ecolinguistics has a history of nearly 50 years. It derived from thecomparative linguistic study of the famous German educator and linguist, Wilhelm vonHumboldt. Humboldt (1811, 2001) holds that the diversity of human languages is theinherent need of the human spirit. The differences in the characteristics of languageactually reflect the differences in national ways of thinking and perception of activities .More than a century later, under the influence of Humboldt’s view, American linguist andanthropologist Sapir (1912) made an in-depth study of many languages and cultures andjointly proposed the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, also known as the “Linguistic RelativityHypothesis”, together with Benjamin Lee Whorf. In the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis,Sapir and Whorf first points out the complex relationship among environment, culture andlanguage (Li, 2018). In the 1960s, the increasing attention of the word “ecology” spread toall sectors of society from the book Silent Spring written by Rachel Carson. Since then,these thoughts on the relationship between ecological environment, culture and languagehave laid an ideological foundation for linguists to study the ecology of language.
Chapter III Theoretical Framework........................ 20
3.1 Theoretical Foundations.......................................20
3.1.1 Appraisal Theory......................................... 20
3.1.2 Ecological Appraisal System.............................22
Chapter IV Research Design................................. 38
4.1 Research Questions............................. 38
4.2 Data Collection..............................38
Chapter Ⅴ Results and Discussion..........................47
5.1 Analysis of Appraisal Resources in Verbal Modality..............
