A Genre Analysis Of English Tourist Information Texts From The Perspective Of Systemic Function

With the rapid development of tourism, tourist information texts have been taken as the most direct and common information carrier in the communication between the promoters of tourism products and potential consumers. And with the internationalization of tourism resources, English tourist information text (ETIT) will play an important role in driving tourism products to the global market.Based on systemic functional approach, this study conducts the analysis of corpus composed of 30 ETITs from English tourist websites. Hasan's Generic Structural Potential (GSP) model and Halliday's systemic functional grammar are used to analyze the macro structure and micro linguistic features of ETIT respectively. This study tends to reveal the GSP as well as the linguistic forms of this genre, and explain how the communicative purposes of this genre are realized through language.The findings show that the genre of ETIT consists of 13 structural elements, among which 3 are obligatory and 10 are optional. These elements serve the communicative purposes of informing, attracting and persuading. Further analysis on the sequence and iteration of these elements leads to the generation of GSP for ETIT. The analysis of transitivity shows that material and relational processes are dominant, and that circumstantial elements of space and time are used more frequently. These are the main forms through which the ideational function of this genre is realized. Investigation on interpersonal metafunction reveals that declarative clauses are employed to give information and express interpersonal relationship. The findings in the study of textual metafunction of the genre show that simple and unmarked themes are predominant and marked themes are mainly realized through adjuncts expressing the meaning of space and time to show the writers'emphasis on these meanings.The study not only shows that systemic functional grammar is effective in analyzing genre, but also holds some implication in the writing and teaching of ETIT.