An Evaluation Study Of Red Tourism Advertisements In Jiangxi Province

Appraisal Theory was put forward in1990s as the supplement and developmentto interpersonal meanings of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) by a group ofresearchers led by Professor James R. Martin from the University of Sydney. Thetheory was born out of a research project of New South Wales of Australia named“Write It Right” carried out in the1980s and1990s with James R. Martin as theleading researcher and is subdivided into three interacting domains: Attitude,Engagement and Graduation. The three interacting subcategories of Appraisal,therefore, provide a basis for a theoretically informed analysis of the interpersonalmeanings construed in the discourse semantics of texts. It has been highly concernedas a new lexico-grammatical framework and has been applied to analyzing a varietyof texts, such as news, advertisements, book reviews, novels, letters, etc.Red tourism as an activity conveys the revolutionary spirit, helps revolutionaryeducation and embraces revolutionary tradition by organizing tourists to visit therevolutionary commemoration and mementos established since1921—the foundationof Chinese Communist Party. It is a kind of tourism with new themes, combined redcultural landscape tourism with green natural landscape, aiming to promote theincorporation quality of the revolutionary tradition education and tourism industry.Such a special category of advertisements play an important role in the developmentof red tourism, so do the red tourism advertisements in Jiangxi. Though a fewresearches and investigations have been conducted into red tourism advertisementsfrom the perspectives of translation or cultural factors, study of the subject from theangle of Appraisal Theory is still a virgin land rarely trodden by previous scholars. Inview of the situation, this thesis attempts to investigate the red tourist advertisementsof ten famous scenery spots in Jiangxi Province (quoted from the authoritative andwell-known website of Jiangxi Red Tourism) from the perspective of AppraisalTheory. The conclusions and enlightenments of the study are summarized as follows:First of all, the language features of RTAs are overt through the detailed analysis.Their ‘epochal characteristic’, as the most salient trait of the language featurewithholds the brand of the historical time which manifests special historical eventsand historical people;‘educational characteristic’ enables the visitor to acquire andcultivate a revolutionary spirit by offering is a favorable way for people to receiverevolutionary traditional education through the visit of revolutionary sites andexhibition of revolutionary remains, the visit of martyrs’ cemetery and theappreciation of their heroic deeds;‘political characteristic’ reveals the glorious road ofhistory that the Communist Party of China has covered.Secondly, there are some similarities and differences between RTAs and thegeneral tourism advertisements. The similarities are: both of them employ few Affectvalues which indicates that the language in the advertisements is objective, authenticand believable; Appreciation resources are abundant in the depiction of the culturallandscape and natural landscape which are positive for the most part. The differencesof RTAs and other tourism advertisements are: There is a greater majority ofAcknowledge values in heteroglossic Engagement than that in general tourismadvertisements and obviously dialogic in RTAs enables the advertiser and the touristto associate the proposition being advanced with voices which are external to those ofthe advertisements itself and convey the authorial voice as engaging interactively withthose voices; there are more Force values in RTAs than those in other advertisements.RTAs composers employ Force to a greater degree of attitudinal meanings and makethe images of the revolutionary sites more attractive.Thirdly, not all the RTAs in the data are consistent with historical context of thetime. Five of ten calls for improvement. The language of August1NanchangUprising advertisement does not do justice in power to the actual event inChinese history. More Appraisal resources should be employed to depict thehard times of the history of the time; the advertisement of the Autumn HarvestUprising Square should devote more to the depiction of the positive image of the RedArmy men and the details of historical events of the time; the famous event “Revolution with Two and Half Rifles” in Fang Zhimin Memorial advertisementshould be enriched according to the legendary of the historical incident by employingsome attitudinal resources; the language in Huang Yangjie advertisement employs alot of Appreciation values and Force resources (especially Intensification) to make thescenery vivid and impressive, but there are few values to present the historical eventof the time. The great victory in Huang Yangjie Defending Battle should be moreheavily dealt with; the victory of the Long March, as one of the most important eventsin our revolution history, should be given more prominence. Compared with thesignificance of the historical event in Chinese revolution history, more attitudinalresources should be employed to color the historical incident.