East And West Visitors Cognitive Differences, The Symbol Of The Cultural Landscape

Chinese culture, which is the typical representative of Oriental Culture, has showed itself to the ordinary people as a pattern of landscape. All those cultural landscapes are a series of signs—especially the signs in tourism. Tourists appreciate the cultural landscapes by traveling and it contains a process of cognizing the signs. It is very important for both Theoretical Significance and Practice Significance to make sure what the symbolic cognitions of Chinese Cultural Landscapes are and what the differences are from the tourist. The previous research results are rare in this field. This research was set up just because of realizing this problem. And this thesis is organized in five sections.The first section is the statement of the selection of the research subject, the research progress and the significance of the research. The selection of the research subject, which is "the signified cognitions of Chinese Cultural Landscapes from both oriental and west tourists", contains four hypotheses. The research progress is concerned on Tourism Semiotics, Cross-cultural Tourism Research and Symbol.The second section is the statement of the whole research design. The main categories are sign, symbol, culture, cultural landscape and cognition. This research adopts qualitative research method, interview method and content analysis method to study Chinese Cultural Landscape Signs and construct theories.The third section is the statement of the identification of research object--identifying the representative Chinese Cultural Landscape signs. By open questions, album and Statistical calculation, this research identifies 22 representative Chinese Cultural Landscape signs, such as the Great Wall, Beijing Opera, the Forbidden City and so on. There are differences between oriental tourists and west tourists in the concentration degree, importance degree and the perspective.The forth section is the statement of the signified cognitions of Chinese Cultural Landscapes. By manifest content coding and latent content coding, the research results has been gained under the help of necessary second-hand data. And the difference of the signified cognitions of Chinese Cultural Landscapes has been identified.The last section is the statement of conclusions. On one hand, cultural background determines the signified cognitions of the tourist. On the other hand, we construct the theories of the differences we got.There are still limitations in this research and lots of work to be done by the follow-up researches. We hope this research could play the role of throwing a brick to catch a jade piece.