A Linguistic Analysis Of Hotel Brochures: Focusing On Hallidayan Systemic Functional Grammar

This thesis sets out to analyze hotel brochures in English with a view to gather special characteristics they contain. This research incorporated the results of previous studies into a more comprehensible and analytical framework for the interpretation and explanation of business genres. Ten hotel brochures were collected from China and foreign countries. For purposes of providing an adequate depth of explanation of hotel brochures, we explored the underlying rationale and specific linguistic features of hotel brochures and developed our theoretical framework. In this framework, we went beyond the study of patterns of text organization, and started with examining customers' buying process and the communicative purposes of hotel brochures. Then we relied heavily on Halliday's Contextual Features, which are concerned with the lexical-grammatical and semantic structures of the texts of hotel brochures. To further identify the text structure and the obligatory and optional structures for hotel brochures, Hasan's Contextual Configuration and generic structure potential of genres were engaged with a view to identifying its obligatory and optional structures together with the underlying reason for such a format. It is found that the texts of hotel brochures seem to follow certain conventions, and the text contents are highly predictable. The vocabulary and clause structure types used are highly similar and limited as well. This research will shed some light on discourse analysis in terms of its widthand depth and hold some insights for pedagogical purposes.