The Symbol In The Tourist Experience And Its Interpretation

The essence of tour is tourist experience that has not been given enough attention to by Chinese scholars up to now. Therefore, this paper is devoted to the study of tourist experience from a totally new point of view of semiotics, especially talks about the signs and how the tourists read the signs in order to find some fundamentals in tourist experience.The main frame of this study is organized as the following:The first section is the introduction that discusses the origin of this study and reviews the relative studies in oversea and domestic academia. Thus, we can find that semiotics of tourism has not been fully probed into in oversea academia; while, in China there is few literatures on tourism semiotics. Undoubtedly, studying signs and how signs are read in tourist experience can make an innovating contribution to tourism theory studies. In the end of this part, three important terms that are signs, culture and tourist experience are defined.In the second section, the paper analyses the signs in the tourist world including the time, space, agents and things. All of them have symbolic characteristics and abundant meanings. It can be concluded that they are signs indeed and tourist world is a world filled with all kinds of signs; therefore, the tourists encounter a lot of signs on his/her trip. Then, the paper discusses the core event, i.e., the tourist experience in the tourist world. We can make an important conclusion that tourists' reading the signs is the leading activity in tourist experience and also the basic means. The activity of reading signs interlaces with five main types of activities in tourist experience that are tourist consuming, sightseeing, interacting, imitating and playing. All in all, this section answers three questions: Firstly, which signs are there in tourist world? Secondly, why could we say that tourist experience is to read the signs? Thirdly, what is the content and process of signs reading?In the third section, we give a more detailed discussion about tourists' reading...