Taking A Stance In The Discourse Of English Tourism Brochures

Tourism has become an important industry undergoing rapid growth on a global scale. As a form of advertising, the tourism brochure is one of marketing tools for publicizing and recommending tourism products and it has become a principal means of promoting tourism in the whole world. Many researchers have been studying the tourism brochure discourse from the perspective of stylistics, translation, contrastive analysis, genre analysis and error analysis. However, the Appraisal analysis of the tourism brochure discourse is comparatively rare.The Appraisal Theory, a newly-developed lexico-grammatical framework for studying interpersonal meaning in Systemic Functional Linguistics is concerned with varieties of attitudes negotiable in a text. It is a breakthrough for studying interpersonal meaning and provides us with a new theoretical framework to interpret interpersonal meaning in the discourse. And the tourism brochure discourse becomes a new type of material to check its interpretive power.This thesis aims to analyze 50 pieces of English original tourism brochure texts within the Appraisal Theory. Through the thorough analysis, a conclusion can be drawn. It is practical to analyze the English tourism brochure discourse with the tool of the Appraisal Theory. The texts of tourism brochures are interpersonal and attitude-loaded. Almost all the categories of Appraisal resources that convey the interpersonal and attitudinal meanings are involved in the English tourism discourse. Among all these resources, Appreciation, Modality and Force appear frequently.The thesis consists of 5 chapters. Chapter 1 covers a general introduction of the study, including the research background, the research objective, the research questions, data collections and the organizations of the thesis. Chapter 2 reviews previous studies of evaluation and some related notions, previous studies on tourism brochures and on the Appraisal Theory. Chapter 3 presents the theoretical framework of the current study, and some important terms are presented in this chapter. Chapter 4, the main part of the thesis, deals with the appraisal analysis of English tourism brochures. The analysis will closely follow the procedure we have run through in the study. We perform the analysis of the tourism brochure discourse from the perspective of attitude system, engagement system and graduation system respectively. In each part, the analysis will be done in detail from some subcategories of each system. Chapter 5 is the conclusion of the thesis, including the implications of the present study to appraisal and some suggestions for future research.