A Comparative Analysis Of Intertextuality In English And Chinese Hotel Introductions

With rapid world-wide economic development, hotels are playing more and more indispensible roles in people’s daily life, and accordingly, hotel introduction, as a powerful spokesperson of a hotel and a medium connecting customers and a hotel, is of great significance for a hotel to win market. This thesis probes into the intertextuality in Chinese and English hotel introductions through applying theories of intertextuality, and conducts a comparative analysis on the similarities and differences of Chinese and English hotel introductions in terms of their respective frequencies and manifestations.Furthermore, the thesis tries to explore the underlying causes and social factors which lead to these similarities and differences, for the purpose of improving draftsmen’s writing skills in composing hotel introductions, as well as deepening customers’ understanding of hotel introductions.This study is conducted mainly based on Hatim and Mason’s model of intertextuality,assisted by an integration of Fairclough’s and Xin Bin’s classifications of intertextuality.In this study, altogether six types of intertextuality are analyzed, including four types of manifest intertextuality and two types of constitutive intertextuality. The data for this research incorporate 30 Chinese hotel introductions and 30 English ones, all of which are randomly chosen from five or four star hotels in China, America and Britain.Through integrating qualitative and quantitative method, it is found that there are manifestations of intertextuality in both Chinese and English hotel introductions, and intertextuality is the main method to realize communicative functions of hotel introductions. Through analyzing, calculating and comparing different manifestations and frequencies of intertextuality in Chinese and English hotel introductions, we have found that there are differences in the specific application of intertextuality in Chinese and English hotel introductions. Under the guidance of cross-cultural theories, these differences can be attributed to cultural factors, like individualism versus collectivism,different views towards authority, past and future, etc.This thesis, to a certain extent, can enrich the theory of intertextuality, broaden the practice of the theory in non-literary discourse, facilitate the composing of hotel introductions and those introductions in other line of business, as well as provide reference for people’s comprehension of hotel introductions and other related introductions.