| Tourism English belongs to an important branch of English forSpecific Purposes. It has its own special characteristics and laws.However, at present, there are less people studying its characteristics.Moreover, the present research results are scattering without a completesystem and usually from stereotype perspective. So this thesis attempts tostudy the characteristics of Tourism English comprehensively andsystematically under the guidance of cognitive linguistic theories.The research is carried out mainly from three levels: lexicon, syntaxand texts. It mainly adopts the inductive method to collect lots of corpus,from which some regular patterns may be acquired by means ofobservation, analysis and summary.First, the thesis uses prototype category theory, conceptual structuraltheory and iconicity theory to study the structural characteristics ofnew-word formation, terminological formation and lexical collocation. Innew-word formation, people mainly adopt the following methods fromEnglish for General Purposes (EGP): transliteration, literal translation,imitation, compounding and abbreviation. In terminological formation,people mainly express scenic spots by means of metaphor or metonymy.In lexical collocation, people mainly regard the nuclear words in theprevious context as prototypes, which combine with new contextualwords to form new lexicon. Their collocation laws correspond to theprinciple of iconicity. Conceptual structural theory is the theoreticalfoundation of the variation of word meaning. Some special meanings are directly shifted or split from prototypes or subprototypes, whose basiclevel categories incline downward. Tourism context is the condition of theproduction of the special meaning. The closer the relationship betweenprototype or subprototype and tourism context is, the more plentiful thespecial meaning from the prototype or subprototype becomes. Moreover,the word meaning has striking dynamic characteristics.Second, on the basis of the previous research results, the thesisinduces the structural and functional characteristics further in syntax fromEGP. Meanwhile, it studies the syntactic characteristics of TourismEnglish with the prototype category theory and iconicity theory. Thesecharacteristics are mainly embodied in the changes of sentence elements,sentence pattern conversion, mutual conversion between voices andchanges in the number of sentences. Tourism context is the conditions ofsyntactic evolution. The sentence patterns of General English are thefoundation of the variation of the sentence patterns of Tourism English.The theory of iconicity is the cognitive motivations of syntactic evolution.The process of evolution may be summarized by a group of models.Finally, the thesis mainly studies the characteristics of paragraphdevelopment and the constructive characteristics of situational discourseand texts on scenic spots by using the theories of image schema, frames,scripts, and prototype category. The research discovers that the paragraphformation of Tourism English is closely related to basic image schemas,which are main logical motivation that the paragraph extends. Situationaldiscourse may be constructed on the basis of script theory. Because thescript is dynamic, situational discourse is flexible too. According to flametheory, the texts on the scenic spots may be constructed. The thesis thinks the textual contents on the scenic spots have the similar framed scope andits structure is the whole with definite order, which is similar to theparagraph formation. From salient perspective, the textual types on thescenic spots may be determined. According to prototype category theory,a new text may be constructed through imitating other known similar text.This thesis mainly emphasizes the dynamic characteristics ofsemantic meaning and structure. The author thinks it is tourism contextthat causes the semantic and structural changes; some theories ofcognitive linguistics provide lots of motivations of language developmentand evolution.
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