Abstract

Discursive turn and ecological turn serve as catalysts for the burgeoning of ecolingustics. As the central paradigm of ecolinguistics, ecological discourse analysis aims to analyze all discourses from the perspective of ecology. The literature to date suggests that, at present, most of the studies about ecological discourse analysis are limited to natural ecology, and the applications of transitivity in the ecological discourse analysis mainly focus on processes. Therefore, based on the ecosophy of “Holism”, this study applies transitivity focusing on participants to the ecological discourse analysis of Chi Bi Fu and its two English translations, aiming to shed light on the ecological roles of concrete participants in the interpretations of “three dimensional ecology”. The results reveal that five types of concrete participants jointly delineate the universal equality of natural ecology, the optimistic transcendence of spiritual ecology, and the dialectical unity of social ecology. Natural inanimate participants are the implementers of natural ecology and the carriers of spiritual ecology; non-natural inanimate participants play the auxiliary roles of expressing spiritual ecology; human animate participants experience spiritual ecology; non-human animate participants are the implementers of natural ecology and the coordinators of spiritual ecology; and integrated participants act as the inspirations of “three dimensional ecology”. This study further argues that the transitivity-based translation strategies may lead to the passive, backgrounded, and implicit ecological roles of the original concrete participants, thereby influencing the ecological representations of the source text.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.