A Contrastive Genre Analysis Of Scenic Spot Texts In China And Singapore

As a sub-genre of tourism advertising, scenic spot texts attract the readers'attention and stimulate their interest by introducing the special features of the relevant places. Nowadays scenic spot texts have become the most important information carriers between tourist products promoters and potential consumers in the booming tourism industry. But few studies of scenic spot texts are conducted from a generic point of view. In this paper, the author applies genre theory to identify generic structure of scenic spot texts through a contrastive analysis of scenic spot texts in two similar cultural background countries--China and Singapore.For this purpose, 40 texts are randomly selected from websites in China and Singapore to establish two corpora. One is Chinese Scenic Spot Texts (CSSTs) with 20 texts in Chinese covered, and the other is English Scenic Spot Texts (ESSTs) with 20 texts in English covered. Based on the genre theory, especially Bhatia's advertisement move-model, the author first finds out the move structure of scenic spot texts, and then makes a contrastive analysis of the generic structure of ESSTs and CSSTs. Their respective characteristics are examined carefully to reveal why there are differences.This research shows that there are altogether ten structural moves in scenic spot texts. CSSTs contain 9 moves, among which Move 1, Move 3, Move 5 and Move 6 are obligatory moves while in ESSTs, there are 10 moves, among which Move 1, Move 5, Move 9 and Move 10 are obligatory moves. CSSTs and ESSTs share the same communicative purposes which scenic spot texts are supposed to accomplish, it is clear that they belong to the same promotional genre. However, despite the similarity, ESSTs and CSSTs adopt different frequencies of moves and steps and focus on different functions. ESSTs pay more attention to move 9 (consulting information) and move 10 (enclosing documents) while CSSTs tend to emphasize move 3 (justifying the product) and move 6 (endorsement). Through the analysis, a conclusion can be drawn that scenic spot texts are of communication closely dependent upon cultures, that is, even a subtle social-cultural factor might influence the employment of the moves. But culture is not the only and decisive factor shaping the generic structure of scenic spot texts. Physical geography of China and Singapore also imposes influence on that of this genre. The study enriches Bhatia's advertisement move-model and extends the application of promotional genre. Hopefully, the cross-cultural contrastive research could facilitate to produce better scenic spot texts and to improve pedagogy in this field.