Contrastive Analysis Of Attitudinal Resources In English And Chinese Tourist Texts

As a kind of advertising texts, tourist texts cover a wide range of subject matters, including natural scenery, customs and history of the destinations. The main purpose of tourist texts is to attract and persuade the potential visitors to go to the places they are reading about. With the rapid development of tourist industry, more and more scholars begin to study tourist texts from the perspectives of English-Chinese translation, textual metafunction, Mood System, Modality System, etc. This study aims to make a contrastive analysis of attitudinal resources in English and Chinese tourist texts. It focuses on the distributions of Affect, Judgment and Appreciation, and the inscribed and invoked attitudinal realizations in English and Chinese tourist texts.This study concerns 46 introductions of tourist destination from tourist websites, with 28 English texts and 18 Chinese ones of different lengths. These texts are to be annotated and analyzed by using quantitative and qualitative methods. Microscopic and macroscopic analysis methods are used to contrast and explain the similar and different attitudinal features in English and Chinese texts.The contrastive analysis of attitudinal distribution shows that English and Chinese texts favor appreciation, followed by judgment and affect in that order. Besides, inscribed attitudes and positive attitudes are widely used in the collected data. The attitudinal realizations are similarly used in aspects as follows:first, inscribed attitude is realized by adjectives and nouns more often than verbs and adverbs; second, invoked attitude is mainly realized by metaphor more often than ideational meaning and quotes/reports. Major differences in English and Chinese texts are manifest in six aspects:first, Chinese texts use more inscribed attitude and negative attitude than English texts; second, affect occurs more frequently in Chinese tourist texts concerning cultural heritage and customs, while it occurs more frequently in English tourist texts concerning modernization and natural scenery; third, negative propriety and positive propriety are distributed differently and tenacity is more frequently used in English texts; fourth, English texts favor valuation while Chinese texts favor reaction; fifth, Chinese inscribed attitudes tend to be realized by nouns while English inscribed attitudes tend to be realized by verbs; sixth, different metaphorical devices are used to express invoked attitudes. Besides, quotes and reports are preferred in Chinese while ideational meanings are preferred in English.This study tests the feasibility of applying Appraisal Theory to the contrastive analysis of tourist texts and broadens the research scope of interpersonal meaning. Moreover, the analysis of attitudinal resources in English and Chinese tourist texts is conducive to our understanding of the persuasive wording of tourist texts. Besides, the study may present a multi-layer perspective by explaining the attitudinal features through microscopic and macroscopic methods.