Ideational Analysis Of Chinese Tourism Texts

The Systemic-functional Grammar advanced by M. A. K. Hallidy on the basis of previous researchers, and continually enriched and perfected by him as well as other scholars home and abroad, is an effective theoretical basis for discourse analysis. It aims at contributing to the understanding of the text and the evaluation of the text from the very beginning. According to this approach, language, no matter which cultural background it is in, has three metafunctions, i.e. ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function, which are interrelated with each other. They form the three stands of meaning that any text in context is supposed to express. Of them, the ideational function encompasses transitivity system and voice system. Transitivity approach to discourse analysis has been applied extensively to literature discourse analysis and other discourse analysis since M. A. K. Halliday made a transitivity analysis of William Golding's novel The Inheritors in the early1970s.Making transitivity system of Systemic-functional Grammar as the theoretical basis, this research is designed to explore ideational meta-function and the potential elements influencing the distribution of it by analyzing ten Chinese tourism texts.Through the transitivity analysis and statistical calculation of the percentage of different processes in samples, this study finds that, two types of transitivity processes make up the majority: relational and material processes, and relational process takes more percentages than material process. In relational process, attributive mode takes more percentages than identifying mode, while intensive type and circumstantial type takes higher percentage than possessive type. Both of the processes appeared in Chinese tourism texts fully realize ideational meta-function. At the same time, the distribution of the process is influenced by the genre and the theme of Chinese tourism texts. Chinese tourism text is a composite genre of description and exposition and its theme is to tell readers the information related to tourism destination. Besides, anaphora helps realizing meta-function of it.