Laymen’s Narratives in Amouddou’s Eco-documentary: An Ecolinguistic Analysis

Abstract

Documentary films, generally of short or medium-length, have informative and educational purposes. They present authentic reports on areas of life, human activities, and the natural world. Particularly, eco-documentaries aim to raise environmental awareness towards the degradation of natural elements; they present alternatives for environmental issues such as pollution, global warming, and deforestation. To reinforce the argumentative process of environmental documentaries, laymen discourse contributes a lot to the meaning-making of productions. Within the framework of discourse analysis and ecolinguistics, this work examines fear and threat expressions used by ordinary witnesses to reinforce argumentation in Lahoucine Faouzi’s eco-documentary entitled “Whining of the Blue Lagoon. In this vein, the ‘perceived severity and perceived susceptibility’ model was used to investigate the implication of fear and threat appeals in laymen’s testimonies. The results show that these expressions are common among laymen’s narratives. This study has many implications for eco-documentary makers, governmental and non-governmental organs, and future research to explore other linguistic features in eco-documentaries on man’s perpetrated damages to the environmental resources.

Man and Woman Identity in Dalihan Na Tolu

“…A study analyzing documentary films due to the environmental issues exposed the laymen's narrative parts which stated that the documentary films, in their laymen's narrative parts, frequently express fear and threat due to environmental issues such as pollution, global warming, or deforestation. The study also defined that the expression of fear and threat is commonly found in parts of the analysis (Mliless et al, 2021). Furthermore, a study analyzing the framing of animals in quranic discourse found that animals in Qur'an are framed into beings, benefactors, ornaments, and celestial signs.…”

The Language of Cultural Ecopoetics: A Linguistic Articulation of Ecological Framing in The Arrival of Monsoon

“…Further multimodal discourse analysis has been performed by Fernández-Vázquez (2021) to measure the environmental website communications of Latin American universities. Some other recent approaches include ecolinguistic analysis of news reports about the Sino-US trade war (Cheng and He, 2021), ecolinguistic discourse analysis of institutional documents to explore the ideological conflict (Niceforo, 2021), the ecolinguistic analysis of contemporary literary journalism literature (Alves, 2021), and ecolinguistic analysis of environmental documentaries considering the contribution of laymen discourses (Mliless et al 2021). Concerning an association between ecolinguistics and Covid-19, the analysis of ecological values of COVID-19 discourses (Misiaszek, 2021;Morozova & Pankevych, 2021) has recently been conducted.…”