Ecological Analysis of Popular Science Articles on Artificial Intelligence

Under the background of increasingly prominent environmental problems,ecological discourse analysis provides a new way for language researchers to analyze the ecology of discourse. Its research objects include both environmental and nonenvironmental texts to guide people to think and act ecologically. Popular science articles on artificial intelligence,as non-environmental ones,communicate new advancements of AI to people in innovative and interesting discourses;meanwhile,they also reflect editorialists' linguistic ecological view. To reveal the ecological orientation of this kind of discourse,the author,combining the theory of SFL with Eco-linguistics,analyzes both superficially and deeply 20 English popular science articles on AI from the perspective of transitivity system. The research shows that,from the surface layer,this kind of text mainly takes the social place as the participant agent,and uses lots of material process clauses and relatively numerous relational process clauses to realize the semantic function of popularizing AI knowledge to readers. From the deep light,the writer's ecological orientation is mainly characterized by ecological ambiguity and ecological protection,which results from the ecological view of science and technology held by science community.