Ecological Discourse Analysis of an UN Environmental Story in Terms of Transitivity Process

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.

Human Representation on Environmental Speech in Terms or Transitivity Process

“…According to Stibbe (2015Stibbe ( , 2020, an ecolinguist, the data which are being analyzed under the ecolinguistic study could be regarded as 'story'. Besides that, considering the research that has been done by Gong & Liu (2018) and the ecological discourse analysis proposed by Stibbe (2015Stibbe ( , 2020, this study asks three main questions: 1) What and how many processes and participants are being used in this story? ; 2) How is each process and participant distributed in the story?…”

Learning about a Woman Queen in Africa: Njinga (1583-1663) as an Ecological Human Rights Defender and a Sister Against Turbulent Times of Racism and War: An Ecolinguistic Study

“…Concerning the theoretical background of this study, Halliday's (1994) three language "metafunctions" categorized as (a) "ideational" ("experiential" or "logical" (Gong, Liu, 2018)), (b) "interpersonal," and (c)…”

“…"textual" (as cited in Gong and Liu, 2018) are applied to the discourses used in Serbin and Joubeaud (2014) and Graciano (2013). Therefore, a clause can be analyzed from ideational, interpersonal, and textual perspectives in terms of Halliday's (1994) theory.…”

“…In this study, her representations as a good strategist and a politician in the movie directed by Graciano ( 2013) and in the comics on her prepared and published by UNESCO (comic strip text by Serbin and Joubeaud, 2014) will be compared from an ecocritical point of view as slavery and mining are also means of nature devastation, leading to turbulent times of pandemics, discrimination, and wars. Arran Stibbe's (2015 and 2021) ecological discourse analysis strategies will be used to divide sentences on Njinga's acts into three categories as those related to (1) destructive discourse, (2) ambivalent discourse, and (3) beneficial discourse in relation to environmental ethics, keeping in mind the Halliday's (1994) three language "metafunctions" categorized as (a) "ideational," (d) "interpersonal," and (c) "textual" (as cited in Gong and Liu, 2018).…”

Eco-critical Discourse Analysis of the Indonesian President’s Statement at the 21st Conference of the Parties in Paris

“…climate change. Thus, one of the ways that researchers and/or scientists can do this is by raising the ecological awareness of the society (Gong & Liu, 2018;Stibbe, 2015a). Furthermore, there are some ways to raise the ecological consciousness regarding climate change, one of them is done in linguistics and language use.…”