A Contrastive Analysis Of Chinese And English Introductions To Tourist Attractions From The Perspective Of Textual Metafunction

This thesis is a practical application of the theory of Systemic Functional Grammar to the contrastive analysis of Chinese and English introductions to tourist attractions.Introductions to tourist attractions,as a special genre,have three features: being informative,being attractive and being persuasive.With Textual Metafunction----one of the three Metafunctions in SFG as the theoretical basis,the present research,makes an attempt to study Chinese and English introductions to tourist attractions,with an aim to finding out the similarities and differences in textual metafunction between Chinese and English introductions to tourist attractions.The present research makes a contrastive analysis about 30 Chinese introductions to tourist attractions and 30 English introductions to tourist attractions.According to Halliday,textual metafunction is realized through thematic structure,information structure and cohesion.Thematic structure includes theme and thematic progression patterns,and cohesion includes reference,conjunction,ellipsis and lexical cohesion. This thesis analyzes the collected data from the three perspectives mentioned here above.Through the study of 30 Chinese introductions to tourist attractions and 30 English introductions to tourist attractions,it is found that simple unmarked theme and Constant Thematic Progression Pattern predominate in both Chinese and English introductions to tourist attractions;the frequency of Given plus New information structure is higher in English introductions to tourist attractions than in Chinese introductions to tourist attractions,because the Given information is often reiterated through reference and lexical cohesion in English,but is often omitted in Chinese;in terms of cohesion,both Chinese and English introductions to tourist attractions adopt lexical cohesion as the main cohesive device,but reference and conjunction occupies higher percentage in English than in Chinese,while ellipsis occurs more often in Chinese than in English. It is hoped that this thesis could provide some insights to the translation of Chinese introductions to tourist attractions into English,and contribute to the practice of tourism English and business English writing and learning.