A Stylistic Analysis Of Online English Tourism Texts

With the rapid development of tourism in recent decades, a lot of attention has been drawn to the promotion of tourism products overseas. As a world language, English is naturally selected by various countries as their promotion language, China is no exception. Meanwhile, since people nowadays prefer to obtain tourism information from the Internet instead of newspapers or magazines, many Chinese tourist attractions are setting up their own English websites in order to attract more tourists from abroad. As a special variety of the English language, online English tourism texts have been receiving increasing attention from many scholars. However, there is still little research conducted within the framework of general stylistics.Under the guidance of general stylistics, the present thesis attempts to analyze both the general and unique features of online English tourism texts by examining the ten sample texts chosen from foreign professional travel websites with regard to three aspects, namely linguistic description, textual analysis and contextual factor analysis.Through detailed stylistic analysis of the sample texts, the general stylistic features of online English tourism texts would be summarized as following: linguistic description:visual and audio tools are employed to enrich the word description, and adjectives help to build a positive image of the tourist attraction; At lexical level, pre-modifiers, imperative sentences and interrogative sentences are preferred; At semantic level, rhetoric devices like metaphor, quotation, parallelism are used. Textual analysis shows that online English tourism texts favor subtitles. Additionally, online English tourism texts are greatly influenced by contextual factors.Through analyzing the stylistic feature of online tourism texts, it is hoped that the result of this study will not only help English learners to fully appreciate and obtain information from this kind of writing, but also will serve as a linguistic guide for those who work in the related fields.