A Genre-based Analysis Of Movie Plot-summaries And An Explanation From Intercultural Perspective: Chinese Movie Plot-summaries & American Plot-summaries

With the development of international exchange, movies, as an important form of cultural exchange, have begun attracting the attention of the related industry and society. However, less attention is given to the movie plot-summary although it is the initial communicative channel between the audience and film in practice. In order to facilitate a more successful and effective communication between the film and the audience, thereby, leading to a real triumph in the publicizing a movie, some kind of multi-perspective study in movie plot-summaries should be conducted urgently.In the framework of genre analysis, this thesis conducts a contrastive study in the move structure and some specific language features from the intercultural perspective. The ultimate aim of the thesis is to reveal how the cultural elements influence the genre and improve the understanding and employment of this genre in the intercultural communication.Inspired by the genre theory of ESP and the intercultural study by Kaplan, this thesis brings forward two hypotheses: 1) This research is based on the notion of genre, which predicts that texts written for similar communicative purpose will display similarities in discourse structure across languages (Bhatia, 1993; 2002) setting aside grammatical constraints. It is therefore expected that the findings of move analysis will be similar across the Chinese and English languages. 2)On the other hand, the hypothesis of Kaplan(1966) supposes that a certain culture possesses a specific"preferred language pattern". Thus, different moves as well as various strategies may be employed in Chinese and American movie plot-summaries to fulfill the specific communicative purposes because of different cultures and social contexts.The two hypothesis lead to three questions 1) Are Chinese and American movie plot-summaries similar or different in terms of the genre structure and linguistic feature? 2) What are the similarities and the differences? 3) What cultural elements lead to such differences?In order to make out the answers to the three questions, a tentative analyzing framework is established by integrating the analysis method of Bhatia (1993) and the social-cultural discourse analysis theory by Van Dijk (1997). Besides, Such intercultural communication theories as Hall's (1977) High-Context and Low-Context cultures, and Hofstede's (1983 , 2001) Individualism versus Collectivism, High Uncertainty Avoidance versus Low Uncertainty Avoidance are employed to explore the immanent reasons for the differences of the move styles and linguistic features.The study commences with the analysis of the communicative purposes, and then comes to the detailed comparison of move discourse structure and linguistic features. After the analysis of the samples, the answers to the questions of the research are worked out. On one hand, the similarity of the communicative purpose leads to the similarities of the mode of narrative and language. On the other hand, the differences of the cultures entail the differences of genre structure and the strategies to realize the moves. The order of the moves of the two kinds of texts is similar, while Chinese samples contain two more moves than American ones do. Meanwhile the focus of the strategies to realize the same type of move is different. Chinese samples pay more attention to the strategies of emotion-provoking and contextualizing to deliver more information, while American ones emphasize the strategies of simplicity and curiosity-stimulating to control the information conveyed. In the choice of language, both kinds of samples employ few adjectives but many complex sentences, but the sentences in each move of every Chinese sample are relatively more than those in American ones, which shows Chinese movie plot-summaries would rather convey complete information. As this thesis does, we should understand those differences and similarities from the intercultural perspective so as to utilize the genre more effectively.It is the author's hope that this thesis will facilitate the writing and teaching of this genre, thereby making contributions to the successful communication between the movie and the audience so as to occupy the market with a significant edge.