The Construction of Ecological Features of Environmental Discourse: As Exemplified in the “China Daily News Corpus of Climate Change”

As a type of discourse related to natural environment or environmental problems, environmental discourse has been widely studied in academia. Ecological discourse analysis, a research perspective of ecolinguistics, has been gaining importance in the construction of ecological features of ecologically related discourse or discourse of any theme or type. Corpus-assisted or corpus-aided discourse analysis, a positivistic perspective, is a general practice in discourse analysis. Through the combination of the two perspectives, a corpus-assisted/aided ecological discourse analysis, serves as a new approach to the construction of ecological features of discourse. Against the backdrop of climate change across the world, the ecological discourse analysis is enacted closely in line with the ecosophy which integrates the ecological dimension of a “community with shared future for mankind” on the one hand, and “man and nature are in the same biotic community” as an ecological view of nature on the other hand. With the help of specialized corpus tools, this study compiles a “China Daily News Corpus of Climate Change” (with 1 main corpus with 4 subcorpora), analyzing the data in terms of the wordlists of the subcorpora, the keyword lists of the 4 subcopora, and the concordance of the key word in context (i.e. “climate change”) and its collocations in the whole corpus. As a type of environmental discourse, China Daily's news of climate change turns out to be ecologically beneficial due to its conveyance and construction of a harmonious relationship between man and nature; explication of the newspaper's attitude toward issues involving climate change; and emphasis on the Chinese position as well as the global vision.