Contrastive Analysis Of English Cultural Tourism Texts On Chinese And English-speaking Countries’ Websites

This thesis adopts the Appraisal Theory to analyze the English cultural tourism texts selected from tourism websites in China and English-speaking countries. Situated in Systemic Functional Linguistics, the Appraisal Theory intends to illuminate interpersonal meaning at the level of discourse semantics. The Appraisal Theory can be divided into three subsystems:Attitude, Engagement and Graduation, which respectively deals with the attitudes involved in discourse, feelings concealed and the standpoint that the speakers hold (Wang Zhenhua,2001, p.13).Tourism texts are mainly used to promote the scenic spots and attract potential tourists, so they employ a large number of evaluative resources. China, as one of the four great civilizations, owns a large amount of cultural landscapes that attract numerous foreign tourists. However the previous studies seldom discuss the evaluative resources employed in cultural tourism texts. This thesis aims to examine the evaluative resources in English cultural landscape tourism texts in China and English-speaking countries, focusing particularly on lexical resource to bridge the gap in previous studies.The current paper aims to address three research questions:(ⅰ) How are evaluative resources employed in English cultural tourism texts to promote the tourism products and services? How are evaluative meanings constructed through the expression of attitudes? And how are the constructed evaluative meanings graded? (ⅱ) What similarities and differences can be identified in the usage of evaluative resources in the two varieties of English cultural tourism texts and what account for such similarities and differences? (iii) How can the Chinese writers improve the English tourism texts writing to attract more potential tourists?According to Standards of Surveys on Chinese Tourism Resources, cultural landscape refers to the scenic spots involving historical relics, folk customs, culture and arts. As the limitation of the thesis’ space and more humanistic feelings employed in cultural tourism texts, this thesis will concentrate on the analysis of evaluative resources in cultural tourism texts. In the current thesis,40 English cultural landscape tourism texts (CTT) are collected from China (CTT-C) and English speaking countries’ websites (CTT-E), among which 20 texts are selected from the websites in China, and the other 20 from the websites in English speaking countries. Based on manual annotation, the UAM Corpus Tool is then used in the statistical analysis. All results are obtained by adopting quantitative statistics and qualitative analyses.Based on the Appraisal Theory, a contrastive analysis is conducted on the evaluative resources in CTT-C and CTT-E, and the findings are as follows:On the whole, some of the evaluative features in CTT-C and CTT-E have no obvious difference in the distribution, such as positive and negative resource, contract and expand resource, as well as force and focus resource. And there are also differences in the adoption of other evaluative resources. In terms of attitude, the appreciation resource is the first choice for both categories of texts and it is more densely used in CTT-C than in CTT-E; the affect resource is much more frequently used in CTT-E than in CTT-C; the security resource is not used in CTT-E, and the invoked resources are preferred in CTT-C. This reflects the characteristic of the Chinese people, who are generally conceived to be more reserved in expressing feelings than native English speakers. With regard to the engagement resources, monoglossic resource is more frequently used than heteroglossic resource in CCT-C and CCT-E. However, monoglossic and heteroglossic resources are more frequently and balanced employed in in CTT-E. In terms of Graduation, the number of force resource far outweighs focus resource in both CTT-C and CTT-E. On the other hand. more focus resource is employed in CTT-E than in CTT-C.This thesis reveals the distributional patterns of evaluative resources in English cultural tourism texts on the websites in China and English-speaking countries, with aims to improve the quality of English cultural tourism texts on Chinese websites and make contribution to the application of Appraisal Theory and cultural tourism texts analysis.