A Genre-Based Analysis Of English Print Tourism Advertisements

English tourism advertisements (TAs) play an increasingly important role in China's foreigntourism market. However, analysis of TAs from the linguistic perspective is far moreenough. This paper aims to present form-function correlations in English tourism advertisingdiscourses.This study attempts to analyze TAs as a specific sub-genre and summarize the linguisticfeatures and professional conventions utilized to achieve specific communication purposes.The genre-based analysis in this paper focuses on both lexico-grammatical features ofsample discourses and the functional and rhetorical moves of their generic structure. Theappraisal theory is introduced in the study of lexio-grammatical features. This marriage ofgenre-based approach to the appraisal theory gives a relatively comprehensive analysis ofTAs.After analyzing 50 samples of advertising discourse that were randomly selected fromBritish travel agencies, the author of this research formulates the generic structure of BritishTAs: Move 1: Arousing attention and awareness-Move 2: Establishing credentials / Statingposition-Move 3: Introducing the offer-Move 4: Celebrity endorsement / Testimonialfrom satisfied customers-Move 5: Directive information-Move 6: Soliciting responses.These moves and steps in each move could fulfill the communicative purposes of the TAs.The statistics show that Move 1, Move 3, and Move 6 appear to be obligatory moves, whichconstruct the main structure of all the TAs. Move 5 is more or less obligatory, while Move 2and Move 4 are optional moves that can be selectively used in accordance with specificsituations.The research goes further to probe into the linguistic features of tourism advertisingdiscourse by employing the appraisal theory. The study shows that tourism advertisingdiscourses foreground appreciation over affect to deliver and negotiate advertisers' attitude,while judgment is seldom employed. Authorial affect is hardly used and non-authorial affectis sparingly resorted to. The strength of evaluation is controlled by grading resources, bothlexical and grammatical, which tone up or down the evaluation to the desired level. Tourismadvertising discourses on the whole are monogloss ones with copywriters as the mainsource. However, in some cases, other voices are introduced so as to establish dialoguewithin discourse.