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

  • Fan Yang

    Fan Yang received his PhD in English Language and Literature from Shanghai International Studies University in 2021 and is currently a lecturer at Wenzhou University. His research interests include pragmatics, discourse analysis and stylistics. He has published articles in journals, such as Foreign Language Teaching and Research, and Language and Literature.

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Published/Copyright: October 17, 2025
Text & Talk
From the journal Text & Talk

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.


Corresponding author: Fan Yang, School of Foreign Studies, Wenzhou University, Building 9, North Campus, Wenzhou 325035, People’s Republic of China, E-mail:

About the author

Fan Yang

Fan Yang received his PhD in English Language and Literature from Shanghai International Studies University in 2021 and is currently a lecturer at Wenzhou University. His research interests include pragmatics, discourse analysis and stylistics. He has published articles in journals, such as Foreign Language Teaching and Research, and Language and Literature.

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Received: 2024-04-09
Accepted: 2025-10-07
Published Online: 2025-10-17

© 2025 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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