Stylistic Analysis On English Tourism Texts From Chinese And American Travel Websites

With the flourishing of world’s travel industry, tourism English as an ESP is getting more and moreattention of linguists. At the same time, various researches on tourism English have been carried out.Tourism English, as an ESP, has its own specific characteristics. This thesis attempts to make a stylisticanalysis on English tourism texts from Chinese and American tourism websites with the assistance ofcorpus analytical tools, so as to find the similarities and differences between English tourism texts from thetwo countries. There are two objectives that the present thesis tries to reach:(1) analysis on the generalstylistic features of tourism English;(2) comparison of the similarities and differences between Englishtourism texts from the two countries.In this thesis, two corpora of about200,000tokens are established: corpus of English tourism textsfrom Chinese tourism websites (CCETT) and corpus of English tourism texts from American tourismwebsites (ACETT). Based on the theories of stylistics and the methodology of corpus-based approach, thisthesis tries to make a comprehensive analysis on the stylistic features of English tourism texts in the twocorpora and both qualitative and quantitative approaches are employed to make the analysis valid andauthentic.Three levels–lexical, syntactical and textual levels are analyzed in this thesis and the results aredisplayed from two aspects–the similarities and the differences.Firstly, there are some similarities between English tourism texts from China and America:(1) on thelexical level: in both corpora, short words are more frequently used to increase the readability of the text; interms of word class, nouns are the most frequently employed word class in both corpora to provideadequate information, and adjectives and verbs are also frequently used;(2) on the syntactical level: bothcorpora tend to use long sentences, and the average sentence length is longer than that of general English; in terms of tense, the simple present tense is the most frequently used tense in both corpora; on theemployment of voice, active voice is the dominant voice in both corpora;(3) on the textual level: on theemployment of cohesive devices, conjunctions are frequently used in both corpora to make the textscohesive; in terms of modality, modal verbs are frequently used in both corpora to express the writers’emotions and attitudes, so as to attract potential tourists; on the adoption of rhetoric devices, variousrhetoric devices have been used in both corpora, and personification is the dominant one.Secondly, there are significant differences between English tourism texts from China and America:(1)on the lexical level: in terms of word class, American tourism websites tend to used more nouns and verbs,while Chinese tourism websites prefer adjectives; on the employment of personal pronouns, Chinesetourism websites employ more “it” and “they” but less “you” and “we”; and on the lexical diversity ofEnglish tourism texts, ACETT has a higher lexical diversity than CCETT;(2) on the syntactical level: interms of sentence length, CCETT has a much longer average sentence length than ACETT; on theemployment of tense, except the dominant tense–simple present tense, the other tenses are also used inACETT with similar proportions; while CCETT employs a large proportion of simple past tense in additionto simple present tense; on the employment of voice, ACETT tends to use more active voice to transferinformation more directly; while in CCETT, passive voice is more frequently used;(3) on the textual level:on the employment of cohesive devices, American tourism websites tend to use a larger proportion ofconjunctions to make the texts more cohesive; in terms of modality, American tourism websites use moremodal verbs than Chinese ones; on the adoption of rhetoric devices, Chinese tourism websites preferparallelism, while American ones metaphor.Through this study, the similarities and differences between tourism texts from American and Chinesetourism websites on each level are obtained. It is hoped that the research results can not only provide some references for the writing of English tourism texts in Chinese tourism websites, so as to contribute to theestablishment and perfection of Chinese tourism websites, but also bring some benefits to the teaching andlearning of tourism English.