Participant Role Allocation and Ecological Ideology Construal in Nature Documentary Film

In SFL,participant roles refer to the subsystem of transitivity that embodies ideational function and constructs the world with process.The core component of transitivity system is the process,which requires the allocation of specific participant roles to complete the construal of meaning.Based on a documentary film of BBC and the social actor representation framework proposed by van Leeuven,this paper aims to explore how the ecological ideology is constructed by analyzing the role allocation strategies from three aspects(activation and passivation, generification and specification,as well as nomination and differentiation).The result shows that there are three features in terms of participant roles allocation in nature documentary films.Firstly,most of the active roles are assigned to non-human beings instead of human being; secondly, the animals in the films are activated by assigning them major participant roles rather than minor ones; lastly,the film producers use collective pronoun to refer to animal roles rather than singular pronoun “it” so as to reduce the anthropocentrism tendency.