Systemic Functional Approach To Contrastive Studies Of English And Chinese Travelling Texts

Text analysis is one of the branches of linguistics, which has been developed in recent years. Many scholars have done a lot of researches in this field and published many articles. However, contrastive text analysis hasn't been paid much attention to until 1980s, for which it is very important to seek appropriate linguistic theories as its tool. Moreover, the contrast of English texts and Chinese texts in traveling genre is still a gap.Therefore, my research makes an attempt to contrast English traveling texts and Chinese traveling texts, with Systemic Functional Linguistics as tool, Brief Introductions to Attractions as corpus data, to find the likenesses and differences of textual properties between them and to testify the applicability and effectiveness of SFL in contrastive text analysis.Halliday assumes that linguistic system include three subsystem: semantic, lexico-grammatical and phonological, with semantic system as its core, which goes upwards to connect context and goes downwards to connect lexico-grammar. Included in this semantic system are three functional components: ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function. In the present research, textual function will be given prominence.Text is a semantic unit. It must satisfy three conditions-generic structure, textual structure (including Thematic structure and Information structure) and cohesion. Later, Hu (1994) and Zhang & Liu (2003) developed his ideas, arguing that mood structure and transitivity structure can also become one part of textual structure.The present research falls into six chapters. The first chapter is introduction to the research, including its background, goal, methodology and originality of research etc. The second chapter gives a review to text analysis, introduce the theories of Systemic Functional Linguistics. The third chapter makes an analysis and contrast of generic structure of English traveling texts and Chinese traveling texts and then discusses generic structure and writing teaching. The fourth chapter makes contrast of textualstructure of English traveling texts and Chinese traveling texts and relates its inspiration to translation. The fifth chapter is the contrast of cohesion of English traveling texts and Chinese traveling texts. The last chapter draws a conclusion.The study shows that text with cohesion is not necessarily coherent, nevertheless, cohesion is a very important means of coherence. Coherent text is represented by some formal features in such aspects as textual structure and cohesion. However, English traveling texts and Chinese traveling texts have their similarities and distinctions.From the angle of generic structure, two elements: Name and Resources are obligatory in English, while in Chinese, there are three obligatory elements: Name, Location and Value. In addition, English and Chinese have some common and different optional stages and their positions in the texts are often different. This reflects the fact that different cultures have different conventions of going in for the same activity.From the perspective of textual structure, Chinese texts and English texts present the similar thematic structure, including similar markedness and umnarkedness of the themes and Constant Theme Pattern, but a little different in multiple themes and Linear Theme Pattern. The contrast of the information structure shows that the frequency of Given plus New structure in English is higher than that in Chinese. Given information is often reiterated through reference and lexical cohesion in English, but often omitted in Chinese, thus New information is more prominent in Chinese, which is more beneficial to the developments of the texts. Then for the mood structure, both English and Chinese employ declarative mood to provide information to the readers, but in English imperative mood is also allowed to urge readers to join in the traveling, which is the character of low-context culture language and embodiment of multiple-culture of English. In addition, mood can be shown by the sequence of Subject and Finit...