‘Wild through Words’: An Ecolinguistic Investigation of Salience and Evaluation in Disney’s The Lion King

Abstract

This study aims to analyze the salience and evaluation in the animated movie The Lion King   to discover the lexical choices related to ecology in the movie. To achieve these objectives, the model of ecolinguistics presented by Stibbe (2015) was employed. There are many areas of life that are magnified and appraisal patterns are also found throughout the plot of the movie. This study has adopted a mixed-methods research approach and uses purposive sampling while collecting data. Transcript of the movie The Lion King was used to analyze the data. After the analysis it has been found that the movie was teemed with lexical choices that have relation to environment and ecology and many nouns, noun phrases, verbs and adjectives are evidence of this connection. Moreover, it is discovered that the movie not only contain countless appraisal patterns but also try to put light on many aspects of environment and ecology. It is also found that magnification of various areas of life is quite apparent in the transcripts. The appraisal patterns here point to the positive or negative evaluation and salience refers to the prominence of things, individuals and notions. It is also suggested that the movie can be studied for erasure and other ecofeminmtitc elements in future.