Socio-Ecological Efficacies of Narrative Discourse: An appraisal approach to the science fiction Gehenna

This paper discusses the socio-ecological efficacy of narrative discourse from the semogenic perspective.The theoretical vantage point is the three metafunctions of language categorized by Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), and the illustrative text is a narrative discourse titled Gehenna.It argues that, in Gehenna, the ideational semiotic world created there is odd and fantastic from alternative ways of story telling, the purpose of which is, however, to enact one or more than one social value to account for the dialectic symbiosis of individual alienations and social behaviours.Meanwhile, the unique way of text organization of the above two aspects of meaning has the significance of adding new ways of thematization and informationalization, which provides an opportunity to increase the linguistic resources.It follows that the socio-ecological motive of a narrative text is multi-functional and cannot be simply claimed to be positive or negative in ecologicality.The paper concludes with the scope and observation criteria of ecolinguistics and envisions its future research prospects from the SFL perspective.