Positive ecological concepts in discourses of animals: an ecostylistic analysis of the documentary Wild China

Abstract Since language plays an important role in the construction of ecological thoughts, the investigation of discourses of animals has become a major concern in the field of ecolinguistics. However, there has been a small amount of research which focuses on beneficial discourses of animals and engages in linguistic analysis of the positive ecological concepts conveyed by them. Therefore, this paper, from an ecostylistic perspective, employs ecological discourse analysis (EDA) to examine how positive ecological concepts are framed through representative discourses of wild animals in the documentary Wild China . More specifically, it draws upon transitivity patterns in conjunction with appraisal patterns within Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) to analyse the clusters of linguistic features in discourses of wild animals and interpret the underlying ecological ideologies that can be realized from these linguistic expressions within the Chinese ecological contexts. The findings show that the discourses of wild animals in the documentary mainly carry two explicit ecological concepts, namely “living” and “equality”, and two implicit ecological concepts, namely “harmony” and “sustainability”. Through the application of the ecostylistic approach, this paper sheds light on the impact of discourses of animals on the transportation of positive ecological concepts.