A Functional Approach To The Coherence Of English Tour Commentaries On Scenic Spots

With the development of economy and prosperity of the tourism in China, millions of English speaking foreign sightseers come to China every year. Therefore, English tour commentaries, as the tool of tour guides to explain something about sights is paid more and more attention. However, some problems exist in the communication between our tour guides and foreign tourists, and lack of coherence is one of these problems. Besides, in the process of teaching, many writing teachers must have found a phenomenon that although some students'writings are generally grammatically correct, their writings do not make sense very well. In fact, this most probably results from lack of cohesion and coherence to some degree. In the aspect of theory, many linguists have done some researches on tour commentaries. However, these studies have been made from the angle of translation and cross-cultural communication and few researches on the coherence of tour commentaries have been made by drawing on Systemic Functional Grammar (hereafter SFG).The present research takes the textual meaning within SFG as theoretical basis and makes researches on coherence in terms of structural and non-structural features around the clause. The structural research within the clause refers to the analysis of thematic structure and information structure of tour commentaries; the non-structural research beyond the clause refers to the analysis of the cohesive devices of tour commentaries. By making a study of the coherence of tour commentaries, the present thesis is written in an attempt to extend the research area of SFG and prove its strong interpretive power on one hand, and on the other hand, to shed some insights for the pedagogical implications of English teaching, especially teaching of tourism English and writing of English.The present thesis chooses fifteen tour commentaries texts from three representative textbooks, which are widely used and welcomed by English learners and students. Five texts of tour commentaries on scenic spots come from a book Tourism English Conversation, and five texts of tour commentaries from Tour Guide English and the rest five from The Way to Communication Ability in Tourism. Research findings are presented as follows: In term of structural feature, in thematic system, simple theme tends to appear more often than multiple theme and clausal theme in the total number in the chosen passages; within the multiple theme, textual theme is widely used; in term of information system, The Given information→New information…pattern is used to achieve coherence. In term of non-structural feature, i.e. cohesive devices, lexical cohesion and reference frequently occur.