A Study On The Generic Structure Potential For English Introductions Of Torusit Attractions On Both Chinese And American Official Websites-A Contrastive Study Based On Genre Analysis

Genre analysis is a branch of discourse analysis and its value in relevant studies has been recognized by researchers. Genre analysis combines a variety of disciplines to describe and explain the features of texts underlying various genres. Three theoretical schools are widely accepted, namely the New Rhetorical Studies, ESP/EAP supported by Swales and Bhatia and Systemic-functional linguistics supported by Martin. As to the identification of a genre, Swales proposed that genre is characterized by a set of communicative purposes. The purpose of introductions of tourist attractions is to attract target tourists. Bhatia made a detailed study of product and self promotion in business settings. The current study shares the same purpose with Bhatia’s study on genre underlying the business setting. The notion of generic structure potential was first proposed by Ruquaiya Hasan, which contributes a lot to the study of genre analysis. Studies on GSP mainly focus on the generic features such as the obligatory elements, optional elements and element order of texts underlying a certain genre. The current study focuses on the tourist discourse with the help of genre analysis methods. Swales’ and Bhatia’s model are short of indentifying move orders while Hasan’s GSP explores the element orders. Since Swales focuses on texts underlying academic settings, the current study combines Bhatia’s model and Hasan’s GSP in explaining generic structures. By applying move-step and GSP, the structure features are figured out in the current study and suggestions are made to the English introductions of tourist attractions on Chinese official website.The tourism industry is an important part of economic development for countries around the world. Thus it is worthwhile to study tourist discourse. This study aims to explore the feature of generic structure potential for both English introductions of tourist attractions on Chinese official website (hereafter EITAC for short) and English introductions of tourist attractions on American official website (hereafter EITAA for short) and the differences between the two as well.20 EITAC texts and 20 EITAA texts were collected and quantitative and qualitative analyses were made.The current study finds that EITAA enjoys a variety in structural parts which provides more details and information about the places under introduction. Differently, EITAC lacks variety in structural parts and the position of the structural parts are rather consistent from text to text. The finding suggests that English introductions of tourist attractions on Chinese official website can be written in a native way in terms of structural parts and the sequence between structural parts.