Ecological Discourse Analysis of News Reports on Japanese Nuclear Wastewater Discharge from the Perspective of Transitivity: Based on UAM Corpus Tool Corpus Annotation Software.

In August 2023, Japan began to discharge the first nuclear wastewater, bringing about serious damage to the Marine ecological environment, which has attracted considerable media attention internationally. Drawing on the transitivity in Systemic Functional Linguistics and influenced by the ecosophy principles of "diversity and harmony, interaction and coexistence", this study uses UAM Corpus Tool software to annotate and conduct ecological discourse analysis of the news reports on Japan discharging nuclear wastewater in China Daily. The results show that the action process represents the largest share (67.38%), and then the relational process (11.89%) and the communicative process (9.59%). The mental process takes up a smaller share (5.41%), while the existential process (1.8%) and the behavioral process (0.33%) have the smallest proportions. Through the analysis of the components of each annotated process, it is found that when the agent in the action process, the identified subject in the relational process, the communicator in the communicative process, and the sensor in the mental process are all Japan or the Japanese government, the discourse exhibits a negative ecological orientation. Conversely, when these components refer to other Asian countries, a positive ecological orientation is presented. The above research reveals the types of transitivity processes in news discourse and the ecological meanings represented by each process, disclosing the hazards of nuclear wastewater and providing insights for promoting the harmonious development between humans and nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]