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Title Representation of Biodiversity in the series The Age of Extinction and Country Diary by The Guardian: A Corpus-Based Positive Discourse Analysis

Author(s) Iqra Malik

Abstract This work talks about an underrepresented area of biodiversity within the ecological discourse by using Arran Stibbe (2015) Ecolinguistics framework. The story of salience is focused. A mixed method approach is used; the data was divided into three categories: Set A was made up of articles from The Age of Extinction series, Set B was made up of articles from the Country Diary and Set C consisted of articles from The Age of Extinction that talked about biodiversity conservation. Question one is divided into two parts a and b. Ant.Conc tool was used to determine which series is more salient. The second research question seeks to determine the ecosophical orientation of biodiversity conservation in The Age of Extinction series. The Country Diary is more positive discourse than The of Extinction series because there were 16 biodiversity related concrete words in Set A and 54 biodiversity related words in Set B and concordance analysis confirmed that Set B has more positive linguistic practices.The data reflected all those linguistic practices which are characteristic of positive discourse such as: individualization, history, similes, sense images, adjectives and description. Moreover, the researcher also found some other stylistic choices reflected in Set B of the data such as: use of narrative style of the writing, use of present and present progressive tense, rhetorical questions and use of sound words. In RQ2, the researcher found three themes in the ecosophical orientation of the data in Set C: humans as savior of nature, biodiversity protection based on the instrumental needs and biodiversity conservation based on intrinsic value of nature. The analysis carried at the lexical and clause level showed mixed adherence to all the said themes. This research is useful to promote protection of our ecology; one should move beyond human centric needs and cater to the cause of sixth mass extinction by realizing that nature has self worth.

Type Thesis/Dissertation

Faculty Languages

Department English

Language English

Publication Date 2024-04-19

Subject Linguistics

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