Exploring Interaction In American Tourism Advertisements

Meta-discourse doesn't add propositional meanings to the content,but organizes text coherently and convincingly,projects the writer into the text and helps direct his readers to interpret,evaluate,and react to the propositional content as well as the writer's viewpoints.Since Harris coined the term recta-discourse,there has been an increasing interest in the study of meta-discourse.So far,there have been many categorizations for meta-discourse,but no matter how it is classified,it falls into two categories:textual meta-discourse and interpersonal meta-discourse.In 2005,Hyland put forward a comparatively comprehensive and robust model for meta-discourse. This model recognizes that meta-discourse consists of two dimensions of interaction: the interactive dimension and the interactional dimension.Currently,tourism industry makes a great contribution to the growth of China's GDP.So it is necessary to promote the images of Chinese tourist destinations and to attract more potential tourists from home and abroad by advertising.However,until recently few researchers have attempted to conduct an investigation of interactional features,namely the interaction between the advertiser and his/her readers,in tourism advertising discourse under the framework of meta-discourse and provide the copywriters of tourism advertisements with rewarding writing strategies.Therefore this thesis will extend the scope of research.Based on the previous categorizations, this thesis is intended to explore interactional resources in tourism advertising discourse by using a modified model of interactional meta-discourse.This model contains five sub-categories of interactional meta-discourse:hedges,boosters,self mentions,attitude markers and engagement markers.The present study aims to examine these interactional devices through qualitative analysis as well as quantitative analysis.The present corpus is comprised of 50 sample texts which are selected from The New Yorker Magazine and several tourism websites in USA in order to meet the requirements of representativeness and processibility,and to minimize the cultural interruptions.First,through qualitative analysis,the present study demonstrates that interactional devices can construct interaction between the copywriter and potential tourists and realize the function of persuasion.Next,through quantitative analysis,the study shows that engagement markers are the most frequent interactional devices, while in comparing with the results of previous studies,it is found that the most frequent devices in research articles are hedges.What's more,the density of interactional meta-discourse differs in different genres.So,the model of interactional meta-discourse can be seen as a tool for Stylistic identification.It is hoped that this thesis can help to raise Chinese students' audience awareness and provide teachers with insights into working out strategies for writing in ESP teaching.