Stylistic Analysis Of UK's Online Tourist Information Texts

Based on the theories of modern stylistics,this thesis aims at making an overall stylistic analysis of UK's online tourist information texts.All the texts are collected from UK's official tourism websites and a corpus(UKTA) of 114,010 words is built.Since the distinction of a style can not be perceived without comparison,JDEST and LOB are also employed as reference corpora in order to better present the features of UKTA.With the aid of computational approaches,a comparative stylistic study among the three corpora is undertaken qualitatively and quantitatively mainly on visual and audio aids,lexical, syntactical,and textual levels.The research outcome indicates that UKTA really has its own stylistic features.For example:the visual and audio aids of UKTA are colorful.On lexical level:UKTA varies more in vocabulary than JDEST and less than LOB.As for the word length,UKTA is longer than that of LOB and shorter than that of JDEST.Large amount of nouns,adjectives and numerals are used to make the texts informative,appealing and accurate.On syntactical level:the sentence length of UKTA is longer than that of JDEST and shorter than that of LOB.More exclamatory and imperative sentences are employed.Active sentences are preferred,while passive sentences employed are more than those of LOB and less than those of JDEST.The thematisation of time and place adverbials is prominent.On textual level:the text length is short,the adverbial connectors are few and the rhetoric devices are in a large number.The significance of the study is to find out some stylistic features of UKTA so as to enrich the research of tourism stylistics.It is also hoped that the present research of UKTA will shed light on both ESP teaching and learning as well as tourism English writing.