A Comparative Analysis Of English And Chinese Tourism Texts From The Perspective Of Attitude In Appraisal Theory

With economic development,people's living standard has been greatly improved and tourism has played a more and more important role in people's lives,which promotes the prosperity of tourism.An increasingly large number of tourism enterprises have posted introductions of tourism attractions on websites to keep tourists informed of the basic information about the attractions and provoke them to pay a visit.Tourism texts,as a relatively new type of discourse,have aroused wide attention among professors and scholars both at home and abroad.However,a review of literature makes it clear that previous studies on tourism texts are conducted from the perspective of translation studies while few have been done from linguistic perspective.Therefore,based on Appraisal Theory,this study makes a comparative analysis of Attitude resources in English and Chinese tourism texts.Attitude system is one of the three systems of the Appraisal Theory,which focuses on analyzing the evaluation system of language.In order to explore the similarities and differences in the distribution of Attitude resources between English and Chinese tourism texts,this study selects 20 English tourism texts and 20 Chinese tourism texts from American and Chinese tourism websites respectively.Quantitative and qualitative methods are combined to analyze the collected data in this study.First,two small-scale corpora are constructed according to the collected data.Second,Attitude resources are identified and encoded in both corpora and the frequency of each type of resources is calculated.Finally,results concerning the percentage of each type of Attitude resources in the two corpora are analyzed with specific examples.This study has gained the following findings:English and Chinese tourism texts share similarities in the distribution of Attitude resources.First,both English and Chinese tourism texts are abundant in Attitude resources.Appreciation resource which is concerned with evaluation of things occupies the main position in both English and Chinese tourism texts;Affect resource which is related to one's feelings ranks the second and Judgment resource which has to do with the evaluation of people and their behaviors comes last in both English and Chinese tourism texts.Secondly,positive Attitude resource,especially positive Appreciation resource,dominates and negative Attitude resource rarely occurs in both English and Chinese tourism texts.For instance,no negative Judgment is spotted in both corpora.Finally,invoked Attitude,especially invoked Appreciation,plays an important role in both English and Chinese tourism texts,which can exert a more subtle influence on readers' emotions.English and Chinese tourism texts differ from each other in terms of the distribution-of sub-types of Attitude,although they share a similar tendency with respect to the distribution of Attitude resources on the whole.As for Appreciation,Chinese tourism text writers are more likely to adopt invoked Valuation to show the value and preciousness of the destination indirectly while English tourism text writers tend to employ inscribed Valuation to show its preciousness directly.As for Affect,English tourism text writers tend to express happy emotions towards the destination while Chinese tourism text writers are more inclined to resort to satisfaction to show how they are enchanted by the destination.As for Judgment,Chinese tourism texts show a preference to Capacity while English tourism texts show a preference to Tenacity.Secondly,negative Attitude,especially negative Appreciation,is more frequently adopted in English tourism texts than in Chinese tourism texts.It seems that English tourism texts are more objective and authentic than Chinese tourism texts.The present research makes a comparative study on Attitude resources in English and Chinese tourism texts on the basis of the Appraisal Theory,which can provide guidance not only for the study of tourism texts but for the Appraisal Theory.By analyzing the similarities and differences in the distribution of Attitude resources between English and Chinese tourism texts,this study will provide guidance for the C-E translation of tourism texts.In addition,it will help readers better understand such discourse.Meanwhile,it also widens the application of the Appraisal Theory and further proves that Appraisal Theory is feasible to analyze discourses.