Why Does Language Ignore or Disregard the Ecological Environment?Evidence from the Contrasts between Animal and Linguistic Semiotic Systems
Ecolinguistics mainly explores how language uses represent,reward and encourage social practices which benefit ecological environment as well as how the discourses and"stories"constructed by language affect human behaviors and the whole ecological system.However,why does language ignore or disregard the ecological environment?Ecolinguistics gives no answer to this question.Based upon the starting point of this question,the paper makes a contrastive analysis between animal semiotic system and linguistic semiotic system and points out their differences,with the former being indexes,completely relying on ecological environment in order to communicate while the latter being symbols characterized by its relative closure property,without relying on ecological environment.The paper discusses the relative closure property exhibited by language and argues that this property is one of the major causes for language to ignore or disregard the ecological environment.
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