Volume 7, Issue 1

Much has been written about the ecological perspectives of Buddhism and Daoism, as examples of philosophies which emphasize process, impermanence, interconnectedness, and compassion for nature. And the interconnectedness of the various elements of the biosphere and the Earth’s crust is the basis of ecological Gaia theory . Some physicists and process philosophers have drawn attention to the inadequacies of European languages to represent the world of quantum reality, radical undifferentiated wholeness and interconnectedness, and the dynamism and uncontrollability of the material world. Notable among these were physicists David Bohm and David Peat, who looked to Blackfoot, an Algonquin language of North America, for a better representation of the natural world as interacting processes. This article explores some of the commonalities between Buddhism/Daoism, process philosophies, modern physics and ecological theory. It then addresses the question of the affordances different languages and grammars provide for a deep ecological representation in tune with quantum physics and Buddhism/Daoism. The climax of the article starts with the work of Michael Halliday on the local grammar of William Golding’s The Inheritors (Golding, William. 1961 [1955]. The Inheritors . London: Faber), and performs a similar grammatical analysis of two passages from Golding’s later work Pincher Martin (Golding, William. 1956. Pincher Martin . London: Faber). It concludes that the Neanderthal mind style and life style in The Inheritors and the world of the drowning Pincher Martin are represented in a grammatical style more appropriate for a Buddhist/Daoist/quantum physics/deep ecological worldview of human interaction with the natural world.

Ecolinguistics studies the interactions between language and ecology. It investigates whether the stories created by language are destructive or beneficial to all the constituents of the environment. In search of positive stories for our environment, this article focuses on vegan campaigns which generally bring awareness about veganism that, in turn, advocates protection of nonhuman animals and abstention from their exploitation. Nonhuman animals are part of the ecosystem and the way they are portrayed in language may determine the relationship between human and nonhuman animals. As vegan campaigns refer to nonhuman animals as sentient living beings, it is important to analyze whether the language and image of these campaigns articulate their purposes and create beneficial stories for nonhuman species. This article explores the stories regarding nonhuman animals in 27 posters of the vegan campaign “Go Vegan World” and examines how these stories are shaped and whether they are aligned with vegan values. The study is approached from an ecolinguistic perspective with a focus on multimodality where the language was analyzed through van Leeuwen’s Social Actor and Social Action theory, and the image was analyzed with Kress and van Leeuwen’s Grammar of Visual Design. Further, the analysis involves the ecosophy defined as a personal ecological philosophy of relationships between human and nonhuman animals, plants, and the physical environment. The findings suggest that the campaign language and image shape three stories: salience where nonhuman animals are individuals with their own feelings and lives; conviction that nonhuman animals matter as much as humans; ideology where biocentrism is promoted. By comparing these stories with the article’s ecosophy, an ecolinguistic analysis showed that they are largely beneficial in representing nonhuman animals as sentient living beings who are equal to humans.

Current dominant narratives of economic growth, consumerism, and anthropocentric views on human existence, to name a few, are behind the driving forces responsible for the increasing destruction of the very own ecological systems that all life depends on. By utilizing tools of Discourse Analysis while adopting an ecological perspective, the free online course The Stories We Live By (TSWLB) offers a practical and accessible framework in which stories can be critically evaluated, questioned, and resisted. Crucially, students are encouraged to apply their newly acquired theoretical insights to search for alternative stories to live by. While current approaches of impact assessment beyond academia can be measured more readily in the sciences, it is harder to assess whether, how, and to what extent humanities research produces change in society; arguably, the digital format of the course adds to the complexity of assessing its impact. In this article, the authors aim to draw attention on the inherent value of the dissemination of traditional academic tools beyond academia. By combining both qualitative and quantitative methodologies in relation to the free online course TSWLB as a case study, the article provides an innovative tool to effectively measure impact which renders itself suitable for a wider range of disciplines across both traditional and digital humanities.

The COVID-19 pandemic, as a public health emergency of international concern, is the most extensive one to afflict humanity in this century and poses a grave threat to human life and health. Facing this unknown, unexpected and devastating disease, China makes an all-out effort to fight against it shoulder to shoulder with the rest of the world. Based on the ecosophy of “diversity and harmony, interaction and co-existence” and with ecolinguistic appraisal system as the theoretical framework, this study provides an ecological discourse analysis of news coverage of COVID-19 in China in The Times and The New York Times , two major Western mainstream media outlets, aiming to reveal the appraisal characteristics and ecological orientations of the news coverage on this public health emergency as well as the attitudes of the two major Western mainstream media outlets concerned towards China’s fight against COVID-19, thus helping people to understand the news discourse on this major public health emergency and in turn to distinguish different media positions. It is found that both news outlets employ more negative appraisal resources to express their attitudes towards China’s fight against COVID-19 and their news coverage is to a greater extent eco-destructive.

In recent years, in Nepal, while some languages of the nation are on the verge of extinction, some foreign languages (such as Japanese, Korean, Chinese) are emerging as new attractions among the youths and adults and are widely taught in the marketplaces through the private sector initiative. Against this backdrop, in this article, we have examined the current foreign language teaching and learning situation drawing on qualitative empirical data obtained from the institutes involved in foreign language instruction in a city in Gandaki Province of Nepal. The data were collected from a survey in forty institutes, ten individual interviews and five focus group discussions. Drawing on the data, an ecological model was adopted, which focused on dynamic interaction, co-existence, and competition among languages, and findings were discussed in line with these aspects of ecological understanding. Findings revealed that learning foreign languages has been established as a conduit towards economic gains and opportunities for employment and education, which has largely been contributory towards reshaping the ecological relationship among the foreign languages in Nepal.

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, medical texts on the pandemic have enjoyed wide popularity, and one of the key issues has always been the accuracy and dependability of the information they contain. The use of evidentiality, a linguistic system which functions to indicate the source and credibility of information, is thus worth exploring in COVID-19 texts. Adopting a synthesized framework within the overall model of systemic functional linguistics, this paper sets out to investigate the lexicogrammar and semantics of evidentiality on the basis of data collected in the form of both specialized and popular texts on COVID-19. Evidentiality in these texts is explored along four dimensions: (i) evidential taxonomy , where specialized texts favor reporting, while popular texts favor belief and inferring; (ii) information source , where specialized texts highlight the voices of authorship, original research, and patients, whereas popular texts highlight the voices of scientists, institutions, countries, and laypeople; (iii) modalization , where specialized texts typically indicate a higher degree of modal responsibility than their popular counterparts; and (iv) engagement , where specialized texts favor dialogic expansion and popular texts favor contraction. It is hoped that these findings will shed light on linguistic variation according to different contextual configurations, as well as clarifying rhetorical conventions in discourse communities of science.

A number of studies on transitivity systems of languages have been conducted in the field of Systemic Functional Linguistics. Different linguists have described the transitivity systems of English, French, German, Japanese, Tagalog, Chinese, Vietnamese, Telugu, and Pitjantjatjara, adopting an upward approach which is not effective enough for discourse analysis. So far, there has been no description of the transitivity system of Myanmar in literature. The purpose of this paper is to put forward a clear description of the transitivity system of Myanmar that functions as one of the clause analysis methods from the experiential perspective. To construct a workable transitivity system of Myanmar, the present study follows He’s (forthcoming) (He, Wei. forthcoming. Categorization of experience of the world and construction of transitivity system of Chinese) new description of the Chinese transitivity system containing 32 types of processes that represent our experience of the world. Unlike previous studies, He (forthcoming) proposes autonomous and influential processes of action, mental, and relational clauses with no description of ergativity hypothesized by Halliday (1985) (Halliday, Michael Alexander Kirkwood. 1985. An introduction to functional grammar . London: Arnold) and Matthiessen (1995) (Matthiessen, C. M. I. M. 1995. Lexicogrammatical cartography: English systems . Tokyo: International Language Sciences Publishers). This new model is more comprehensive and effective than previous ones because it adopts a downward approach which can smoothly be applied to discourse analysis. In this paper, the transitivity analysis of Myanmar clauses is performed in accordance with the theories put forward by He (forthcoming) and the semantic configurations of 32 processes in Myanmar transitivity system are illustrated with authentic examples. Findings show that the proposed transitivity system of Myanmar can analyze clauses effectively and it is compatible with the discourse analysis of Myanmar. These findings will make an important contribution to further study of the systemic functional grammar of Myanmar.

As a significant indicator of College students’ ability in academic English communication, academic papers, especially their condensed abstracts require various writing techniques among which the use of grammatical metaphors (GMs) is typical. To improve the English academic writing level of Chinese postgraduate students, it is significant to compare their use of GMs with that in expert research articles. On the basis of Halliday’s reclassification of GMs, this study aims to compare the characteristics of GMs in abstracts of MA theses and expert research articles (RAs). It is found that there is universal use of nearly all GM types in both groups. The two groups are similar in that they share the top five most frequently used GMs, and there are no significant differences in the use of more than half of the GM types. However, the overall GM frequency of expert RAs is significantly higher than that of MA theses. Significant differences are also found in the use of six GM types. Furthermore, some correlations between certain GM types found in expert RAs are missing in MA theses. Reasons for these differences may include the limited understanding of GM, the underdeveloped cognitive ability, the genre differences, and the first language differences. Based on these findings, implications for teaching and learning are discussed.