Analysis Of Dynamicity And Stativeness In Chinese-English Tourism Texts From Transitivity Perspective

In recent years, tourism industry has been experiencing an unprecedented rapid development around the world and it is becoming more and more important on influencing the economy and culture of the whole world. What’s more, it will become increasingly prosperous in the coming days, and bring more economic benefits. It is widely known that Sichuan Province, located in the center of western China, which is also called "the land of abundance", has always been regarded as a hot tourist destination with unique glamour and attraction. The introduction to tourist attractions is becoming a valid way to introduce the history and culture of Sichuan Province to more and more tourists, especially the foreign ones. Thus, the quality of the Chinese and English introductions to tourist attractions is one of the crucial factors for the development of tourism.The systemic-functional grammar believes that language is a product of human social activities. As a communicational tool for people, it serves a variety of functions. There are three meta-functions:ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function. Halliday’s ideational function contains two sub-functions:the experiential function and the logical function. Experiential function refers to the function that language is used to organize, understand and express the perception of the world and of our own consciousness. In other words, it is the representation of the world where whatever s/he does and the relation between people and circumstance. Transitivity is an important semantic system for ideational function, which has been applied in various types of literary and non-literary analyses as an important mode in textual analysis. It’s widely known that Chinese and English are from two different language families. The different features of English and Chinese ought to be taken into consideration while translating the Chinese introductions of local scenic spots into English ones. English languages tend to use more nouns than verbs, while Chinese language is just on the opposite. Therefore, English expression presents a state of stativeness while Chinese language expresses a state of dynamicity. From the perspective of transitivity, different processes also manifest diverse dynamic and static features.Basing on the theory of ideational function from Systemic Functional Linguistics, this thesis makes a contrastive analysis of Chinese introduction to tourist attraction (CITA) and English introduction to tourist attraction (EITA) of major scenic spots in Sichuan Province and finds out the dynamic and static features lying in Chinese and English tourism texts from transitivity perspective of tourist materials in Sichuan. There’re altogether 20 pieces of tourist introductions of 10 scenic spots, including 10 pieces of CITA and 10 pieces of EITA are selected as the corpus of this study. By the contrastive analysis of transitivity, the author finds out the common feature of CITA and EITA is that the main process types are relational process and material process. Secondly, the percentage of relational process in EITA is higher than that of CITA while the frequency of material processes in CITA is higher than that of EITA. Thirdly, the mental processes take up 4% in EITA while they never occur in the clauses of CITA, then the percentage of verbal processes is higher in CITA than that of EITA. These findings from the analysis reflect that EITA is such type of text that carries more features of static description whereas CITA pays more attention to dynamic narration.The author hopes that the contrastive analysis of the transitivity process on CITA and EITA can help the writers of tourist texts further comprehend the similarities and differences of the two languages which ought to be recognized and distinguished. This study aims to help the writers of tourist introductions take the customs of expression as well as the linguistic features of target language into consideration when composing the introduction, so as to help the tourist texts achieve the communicative purpose. Meanwhile it could raise the resonance of the visitors and deepen the knowledge of the cross-cultural tourism for the tourists from different countries and play a bigger effect on publicity.