A Contrastive Study Of Interpersonal Meaning In Chinese And English Tourist Publicity Materials

One of the most important function of language is interpersonal function. Interpersonal meaning is a term drawn from Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar. It refers to how we use language to interact with other people, to establish and maintain relations with them, to influence their behavior, to express our own viewpoints on things in the world and to elicit or change other's opinions. According to Halliday, the realization of interpersonal meaning is typically fulfilled by mood and modality. While many other researchers demonstrate that Halliday does not exhaust all the linguistic devices which carry the interpersonal meaning. That is to say, the theoretical framework of interpersonal meaning should be supplemented and the means of realizing interpersonal meaning can be multiple. Martin takes appraisal system as an important means to realize interpersonal meaning. In addition, the research of Professor Li Zhanzi is the most outstanding one. She claims that there are other linguistic means to realize interpersonal meaning, such as person system, tense, direct quotations, appraisal system etc.On the basis of interpersonal meaning theories including the work of Halliday, Martin and Li Zhanzi, this thesis aims to make a contrast between Chinese and English tourist publicity materials through mood, modality and other means to realize interpersonal meaning. To ensure the reliability and validity of the study, both quantitative and qualitative analysis are employed so as to examine how and to what extent Chinese and English tourist publicity materials are represented from the perspective of interpersonal function.In the present study, tourist publicity materials mainly refers to the texts supply basic and sufficient information on tourist destinations with an aim of publicizing and promoting the tourism products and they may appear in various forms including brochures, pamphlets, guidebooks, picture albums, tour maps, etc. According to the content, tourist publicity materials can be broadly classified into three categories, i.e. brochures or pamphlets of tourist attractions, guidebooks of cities or countries and information on tourist operations. In this thesis most samples belong to the first and second category as they are the most typical tourist information texts among these categories, including 30 Chinese samples and 30 English samples respectively, which come from the author's word-by-word copies of tourist publicity materials found in tourism books, tourism booklets and on the Internet.Through analysis and discussion, the findings can be summarized as follows: Firstly, functional grammar is applicable, not only in the contrastive analysis of novels, poems or expositions, but also in the contrastive analysis of Chinese and English tourist publicity materials. Secondly, there are some similarities between Chinese and English tourist publicity materials: (1) the majority of the sentences in Chinese and English samples are written in declarative mood; (2) both Chinese and English tourist publicity materials share the same communicative function of exclamation, that is, to express the speaker's/writers' surprise and show strong emotional response about something; (3) in terms of mood adjuncts, both in Chinese and English samples, there were plenty of examples in types of probability; (4) simple present tense and simple future tense are popular in tourist publicity materials; (5) the second person is predominant in Chinese and English tourist publicity materials; (6) appraisal in tourist publicity materials can be realized by different lexical choices, that is, adjectives and verbs with positive meaning. Nevertheless, the disparities between the two samples are outstanding: (1) more interrogative and imperative sentences are used in English tourist publicity materials; (2) in terms of person system, the frequency of personal pronouns in English samples is much higher than that in the Chinese ones; Chinese samples have two kinds of forms "你" and "您" in the second person and use "您" to show politeness, while the English ones only have one form you. (3) In the appraisal system, English tourist publicity materials emphasize subjective affect and judgment, while the Chinese ones pay attention to objective appreciation, which reflects a different cultural tendency between the two languages.It is hoped that this tentative analysis of linguistic realization of interpersonal meaning will be a helpful supplement to the studies on tourist publicity materials; and meanwhile it will deepen the readers' understanding of tourist publicity materials and enable copywriters and readers to be better informed about how to express interpersonal meaning appropriately through lexio-grammar in tourist publicity materials so as to achieve the communicative goal successfully.The limitations of the present thesis are shown as follows: due to the limited data and time, some issues concerning the interpersonal function and discourse analysis are untouched, such as the interpersonal metaphor and tenor of discourse. Thus, the exploration is not yet very comprehensive or profound and much remains to be done to enrich and improve our framework.