An Ecological Discourse Analysis of Silent Spring from the Perspective of Corpus-based Attitude System: Human Image as an Example

Abstract

The book Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, a famous contemporary American marine biologist, has prompted environmental issues to become the biggest theme of our time and triggered the rise of the modern environmental movement. In this paper, Two corpus tools are used to analyze the attitude resources related to the human characters in Silent Spring from an ecological linguistic perspective of the attitude system. The study finds that the farmers and workers portrayed in the book are both destroyers and victims of ecology, while the scientists and ecologists play the role of protectors and managers of ecology. The article rejects the previous notion of "an thropocentrism" and reveals that the author advocates an ecological view of nature in which "all things are equal and interdependent", with a view to awakening the ecological consciousness of human beings and then taking the initiative to care for nature and protect the earth.