The Cross-Media Comparison Of English Travel Guides

As a specific genre,travel guides play an important role in informing and attracting the tourists.The referential and informative function of travel guides are realized by various semiotic modes,such as language,photography and diagram.The multimodal contents of travel guides can be delivered through different media,including guidebooks,brochures and tourist websites.Although some studies have been carried out on tourism discourse analysis,they are limited to one medium.This study thus attempts to conduct a cross-media comparison of travel guides.This research purpose gives rise to two core research questions:(1)what are the similarities and differences on verbal and visual semiotic modes among different media;(2)what are the specific connections between semiotic modes and media.To answer these research questions,this study uses both quantitative approach and qualitative approach which respectively reveal distinct features of the travel guides.The travel guides analyzed in this study are chosen from three media platforms of Lonely Planet company,namely,tourist books,tourist brochures and tourist websites.The travel guides corpus for this study is formed by 30 travel guides of London,Paris and Beijing,with 10 texts in each medium.To better characterize the relationship between media and semiotic modes,Bateman’s multimodal semiotic framework for cross-media comparison is applied.Because of the multimodal features of travel guides,this study employs Halliday’s metafunctions framework and Bateman’s Genre and multimodality model(GeM)respectively for the analysis of language features and visual features among three media.Before exploring the syntactic features of language,this study first deploys corpus linguistic method to present the lexical features of travel guides.The British National Written Corpus is selected as a benchmark for comparison.The Wmatrix and Antconc softwares are used to retrieve the frequency of keywords and their concordance in the travel guide corpus.After comparing the lexical features of travel guides,the syntactic features of language are approached with the analysis of interpersonal metafunction and textual metafunction.The introduction and history section of the original text are extracted and divided into clauses.The mood elements,modality elements and thematic elements in each clause are identified and presented in proportion for comparison.Finishing comparing the language features among three media with quantitative method,this study conducts a qualitative analysis of visual features with the GeM model.The travel guides of the Louvre in three media are analyzed from the four layers of the GeM model,namely,the base layer,the layout layer,the rhetorical layer and the navigation layer.The major findings of this study include three parts.Firstly,the similarities on lexical features among three media are the high occurrences of positive adjectives,superlatives,pronouns and foreign words.The differences on lexical features lie in four semantic domains: history,buildings,arts and crafts and travel advice.Secondly,the similarities on syntactic features are the major use of declarative mood,present tense,unmarked theme and small proportion of modality.However,tourist brochures display special syntactic features,such as the relatively higher proportion of imperative mood and modal verbs and relatively lower ratio of marked theme.Thirdly,the overall distribution of base layer units is different among three media.However,the cross-media comparison of layout layer and rhetorical structure layer shows surprising similarities.Finally,the cross-media comparison of navigation layer shows that the tourist book has adopted the three-dimension map to guide readers.Through comparing the verbal and visual semiotic modes of travel guides among three media,this study finds that there are two specific connections between semiotic modes and media.On the one hand,media constraints influence how the designers use semiotic modes.On the other hand,the digital technology and transmedia industry have brought about media convergence,making certain semiotic modes flow across various media platforms.