| Tourism accounts for the largest scale of mobility in the contemporary world,influencing the world not only economically but socioculturally.In the past decades,a large number of researches on tourism have been conducted by scholars in linguistics.Tourist destinations provide one such arena for exploring the understanding of places by examing the relationship between people and place through tourist discourse.The present study,based on the framework of critical stylistics,aims to investigate the linguistic representation of tourism destination through a contrastive study of Chinese and western tourists' travel writing The data used in the present study includes 80 online English travel writings about Lijiang and 80 counter parts in Chinese,both of which were published between 2013 to 2015.The analysis in the present study focuses on the use of the identified textual-conceptual categories,which reveals how tourists construct tourist destinations.The findings of the study demonstrate the effectiveness of critical stylistics in revealing the linguistic representation of tourist destinations.The analysis indicates that the tourism destination,Lijiang,is constructed through the use naming,transitivity,speech presentation,and contrasting as well as implicatures.Although there exist some significant differences in representing Liiang between the English data and Chinese data,textual-conceptual categories utilized in both data are similar.The findings suggest that,linguistically,Chinese tourists construct Lijiang as an imaginary home and a land to pursuit peace and freedom while English-speaking tourists represent Lijiang as a old town to relax.Critical stylistics is a fairly new theory and,the present study is the first attempt apply it to examine the linguistic representation of tourist destinations.It is proved that interdisciplinary approaches,such as this combination of tourism study and linguistic research,may shed insights in revealing the linguistic representation of places and people. |
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