An Analysis Of Webpage Based English Tourism Information Texts From Multimodal Discourse Analysis Perspective

The last decade has witnessed a fast development in the tourism industry around the world. With the rapid development of new technology, especially multimedia technology, people’s way of accessing to tourism information has changed a lot. Internet has become the chief way for people to obtain information, and tourism Web-pages is the most convenient information carrier between tourism product salers and their potential customers now. The meaning-making process of WBTIT involves interaction of various semiotic resources. Apparently, WBTITs are multimodal discourse. Up to date, study on English tourism publication text mainly focuses on printed-page tourism information texts from translation, corpora linguistic, stylistic perspectives, while rare study pays attention to the multimodallity of tourism Web-pages. The thesis will mainly study the meaning-making mechanism in the multimodal discourse of English WBTITs.As a new branch of discourse analysis, Multimodal Discourse Analysis mainly studies the interaction and meaning-making system of different semiotic resources. Being an effective way, Multimodal Discourse Analysis has been applied in many fields such as paper documents, hypertexts and three dimention materials. Multimodal Discourse Analysis not only focuses on one certain semiotic resource, but also pays attention to the meaning-making and intersemiotic complementarity system of different semiotic resources as well.In this thesis, a research of British official tourism Web-pages and Chinese official tourism Web-pages in English version will be made in order to explore the meaning-making mechanisms of WBTITs, and a comparison will be carried out to find the similarities and differencese lie in the WBTITs between Britain and China. In this thesis,16 tourism WBTITs are adopted for the study, ie. eight tourism information Web-pages in English version from Chinese official tourism websites and eight Web-pages from British tourism official websites respectively. To carry out a delicate analysis, the framework of the study is based on Gunther Kress& van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar, accompanied by analysis methods of Halliday’s Functional Stylistics. The analysis will manily focus on the representational meaning, interactive meaning and compositional meaning of the selected Web-pages. Based on the framework, the analysis of the multimodal WBTITs will be more systematic and thoroughful. Through the research, the following conclusions will be drawn:Firstly, the meaning-making mechanism of WBTIT is realized through the deployment of various semiotic resources among which image and verbiage are the chief two modes. Image is the chief mode for meaning-making in British WBTITs, while linguistic text is the chief one in thoses of Chinese WBTITs.Secondly,meanings are constructed through a collaboration of image and linguistic modes in the WBTITs of both countries, but there are differences between China and Britain. The representational meaning of the British WBTITs is:people’s activities and tourists’visiting events in the tourism attractions; while that of the Chinese WBTITs is:the identification, possessive attributes of the introduced tourism attractions in China.Thirdly, as for the interactive meaning of the WBTITs of both countries, all of the WBTITs try to earn the reader’s trust by offering reliable information. The difference is largely caused by the existance of the vector. There is indirect eye-contact in the British WBTITs which forms an imaginary communication between the reader and the represented participant, and the function of persuasion is foregrounded; On the contrary, there is no eye-contact in the Chinese WBTITs, and the function of exposition is highlighted.Fourthly, there are many similarities in the compositional meaning of the WBTITs of Britain and China. In the WBTITs of both countries. Usually, images are the most salient element in the WBTITs of both countries, highlighting the ideal status of the tourism attraction, and the promises it would brings. New information is usually placed in the right section of the screen; The information which representing "ideal status of the product" usually is arranged in the upper part of the screen, and the practical information is in the lower part of the screen. Three kinds of framing devices are used in the layout of the WBTITs to separate, segregate and integrate different semiotic resources into a complete discourse.The research aims to improve our understanding and to testify the capability of Multimodal Discourse Analysis theory and its framwork in analyzing tourism webpage, thus to improve the reader’s literacy of multimodal tourism webpage. Through study of the WBTITs of both countries in the light of VG, we have a better understanding to the meaning-making of multimodal WBTITs, and the differences and similarities among them, which will be helpful to construction of tourism Web-pages in our country.