A Contrastive Study Of The Chinese And English Tourist Publicities From The Perspective Of Functional Linguistics

The emergence and popularity of tourism is closely interrelated to the evolution and development of human society and its way of living. In recent decades, there is growing number of people who would like to enjoy the beautiful scenery and the brand new experiences that tourism brings. No matter in which stages of tourism that the visitors are:pre-trip, on-trip or post trip, tourist materials are of great necessity.Tourist publicity is the simple mean and effective carrier for a tourist spot, a region or a country to self introduce and self promote its tourist resources to the public. On one hand, tourist publicities cover a wide range of information including the introductions to the attractions, the cultural background, and the traveling and catering information and so on. On the other hand, the media of the tourist publicity may vary from brochures, guide books, magazines and newspapers to radios and television. More importantly, no matter what kinds of tourist publicities are, they mirror the perceptions of people, their language habits and communicative purposes. Chinese and English as two languages, their similarities and differences in terms of cultural influence, language features and functions, can fully find the expressions in the tourist publicist. In view of the demonstrations above, this present paper intends to conduct a contrastive study of the Chinese and English tourist publicities.Functional Linguistics proposed by Halliday offers an applicable theoretical framework for the study. According to Halliday, there are three mietafunctions of language:ideational, interpersonal and textual functions, which will be applied to analyze the30samples of on-line tourist publicities, and among them,15are in Chinese and15are in English. Adopting the contrastive analysis qualitatively and quantitatively as the methodology, this paper makes an attempt to explore the language features in both Chinese and English tourist publicities and their functional similarities and differences a well as the underlying explanations. Ultimately, the implications and suggestions on tourist publicity compilation and translation and cross-culture communication can be offered.The major innovation and contribution of this paper lies in that firstly, the tourist publicities are classified in to factual, semi-factual, cultural and mysterious materials. Secondly, based on the definitions and summarized features of each category, contrastive analyses of the Chinese and English tourist materials are presented in accordance with the three metafunctions, and the findings are:1) Factual materials are the descriptions of essential factors of the attractions like physical attribute, appearance or components. Material and relational processes are the most frequently used process in the transitivity system; most of the samples are rendered in declarative mood and in the third person; simple and unmarked themes are the main preferences in thematic structure. As a result, the factual materials are authentic and objective. The difference between Chinese and English is flexibility of English language with regard to process and mood types. In addition, the Chinese tend to employ more lexical cohesions to organize the texts.2) Semi-factual materials refer to the vivid descriptions of the objective features and facts of attractions with modifiers like adjectives and rhetorical devices. This category of materials establishes a friendly relationship between the writer and the reader, stimulating the favorable imagination and association of the readers. One prominence in English texts is the employment of second person "you", which indicates the reader-oriented and individualism of English.3) Cultural materials are the introductions to the cultural substances of human sites or historical heritages, aiming to convey comparatively abstract and complicated cultural information like history, religions, beliefs and customs to the readers. Apart from the features like declarative sentence mood and simple thematic structure, more cohesive devices are used in this kind of materials. Compared to the Chinese texts, the English texts apply more means including persons, tenses to realize the functions. In short, this kind of materials is comparatively formal and serious.4) Mysterious materials take advantage of the curiosity and best wishes of people to "sell" the tourist attraction by telling mysterious, unverifiable, magic or thrilling stories. The high frequency of mental process in both Chinese and English tourist publicities suggests the strong psychological hint and influence of this category. In the English mysterious materials, there are multiple ways like persons, sentence types (especially interrogative mood), and tenses to interact with the readers and to effectively draw their attentions. On the contrary, the Chinese mysteries seem to be formal and plain.By proposing the four categories of tourist publicity and conducting contrastive analyses accordingly, under the theotrtical framework of functional linguistics, this paper unfolds the different language features and metafunctions namely, ideational, interpersonal and textual functions of these four categories. Consquently, some enlightenment could be reached for the tourist publicity compilation and translation strategies and cross-culture communication.