Genre Analysis: Moves In Chinese And English Tourist Information Texts

With the booming of tourism, tourist information texts have become animportant and frequent communicative publicity literature between touristproducts promoters and potential consumers. Nowadays, in linguistics, there aremany studies on tourist advertisements, but few studies touch upon touristinformation texts. Due to the fact that most English versions of tourist informationtexts are poorly produced in China, Chinese and English tourist information textsare worthy of being compared and studied from the new perspective of genreanalysis, which will provide us a satisfactory "thick" description and explanation,and help people know well how a text is organized and why it is organized as it is.Hence, based on the theoretical framework of genre analysis following SwalesBhatia and Hasan, a corpus of sixty tourist information texts (thirty in Chinese andthirty in English) were examined. The present study analyzed and compared thestructural moves as well as the specific linguistic features used in Chinese andEnglish tourist information texts, and explained the similarities and differencesfrom social and cross-cultural perspectives with an aim to shed light on theproduction of quality English tourist information texts in China. First of all, the present study discussed about the communicative purposes oftourist information texts. Then, following Swales and Bhatia's move model, theauthor found that there were thirteen structural moves together in both of Chineseand English tourist information texts. According to the occurrence frequency, fourmoves were considered obligatory and nine were optional in Chinese texts, whilethree obligatory and ten optional in English text. After that, a cross-culturalcomparison was made for the similarities and differences in move choices andlinguistic forms between Chinese texts and English texts. Moreover, based onHasan's GSP (Generic Structural Potential), the GSPs of Chinese and Englishtourist information texts were figured out, which further demonstrated thesimilarities and differences between Chinese texts and English texts in the aspectof allowable move order. The similar choices, regarding rhetorical structure,occurrence frequency and linguistic realization of moves, resulted from thesimilar purposes the tourist information texts, as a branch of promotional genre,were supposed to accomplish, and the different preferences regarding theseaspects were largely due to a number of factors such as the specific values andbeliefs of each culture, which showed that tourist information texts as a genre issocial-culturally dependent communication event, and social-cultural factorsplayed an essential role in shaping genre. Hence, at the end of analysis, the authorfocused on the cultural causes, as subjective orientation vs. objective orientation,group identification vs. individual identification and past recollection vs. futureexpectation, which rationalized the different choices of moves and linguisticforms related to certain moves as destination detailing, quality evaluation andhistoric value between Chinese and English tourist information textsBy doing a thorough genre analysis of Chinese and English tourist informationtexts, the author illustrated how communicative purposes were fulfilled bydifferent choices of moves and linguistic forms in different social and culturalcontexts and why the texts were written in the way they are. Finally, the authorconcluded the present study by touching on the implications on touristinformation texts and other professional genres cross-culturally.