A Study On Subjectivity Of Chinese Tourism Publicity Discourse

Subjectivity,as a common feature of all human languages,has been the major research topic for cognitive linguistics,functional linguistics and pragmatics.Past studies have paid more attention to the specific representation of subjectivity at lexical and syntactic levels as well as individual case studies,but less attention to subjectivity at textual level and the interaction between different levels.Taking the subjectivity of tourism publicity discourse as the research object,the self-built corpus of tourism publicity discourse as the source of corpus,the Construal Theory,the Appraisal Theory and other theories as the theoretical guidance,this paper aims to study the subjectivity framework construction of discourse,analyze the characteristics of the subjectivity representation of tourism publicity discourse and the interaction between the representations at different levels,and finally reveal the relationship between style and subjectivity,in an attempt to provide new ideas for the subjectivity study of discourse.The full text is divided into three parts,a total of ten chapters.The first part is the introduction;the second part includes the first chapter to the fourth chapter,which is the literature review and theoretical analysis.The third part includes chapters five to ten,which is a systematic study of the subjectivity of tourism publicity discourse.The main content are as follows:Chapter One and Chpater two offer the literature review on tourism discourse and subjectivity respectively,find the problems and pave the way for this study.Chapter Three analyses the key elements of the classical definition of subjectivity,puts forward the view that subjectivity of a text is actually a hierarchical constructor composed of macroscopic,mesoscopic and microscopic systems,and that each level is an interrelated and interactive network.Chapter Four studies the meaning construction of tourism publicity discourse.Based on the Construal theory,it constructs the construal configuration of tourism publicity discourse and analyses the construal and conceptualization process,providing an explanatory mechanism for linguistic representation of subjectivity.Chapter Five discusses the deixic system of discourse.Statistical analysis shows that the deixis system of tourism publicity discourse is the perspective formed by the person-space-time system.In terms of person and space,the personal pronoun "你" and demonstrative pronouns "这" and "那" from the perspective of "Self" are widely used;in terms of time,a large number of past and present time,cultural time representations highlighting the characteristics of the times are widely used as well.This deixis system,constructed with potential tourists and tourist destinations as the central points,expresses the communicative strategy of the advertisers empathizing with tourists and tourist resources.Study shows a high subjectivity in the deixis representation system.Chapter Six focuses on the stance system,which includes two main categories:epistemic stance and style stance.In terms of epistemic stance,advertisers use modal verbs of necessity and probability,modal adverbs of probability and certainty,and modal particles to express the degree of certainty of propositional truth value.Representations of evidentiality of "reasoning" are used to indicate that the propositional information comes from the reasoning of the speaker,so as to improve the acceptability of discourse.In terms of style stance,advertisers often express their opinions and prove their stance by "intertextuality",i.e.citing other people’s ideas to establish a stance alliance with others.Chapter Seven,based on the Appraisal theory,makes a statistical analysis of the attitudinal representation system in tourism publicity discourse.It is found that advertisers use positive adjectives to describe tourism resources.Meanwhile,a large number of degree adverbs with positive meaning and subjective big quantity are used to increase the subjective quantity of adjectives,so as to strengthen and upgrade the evaluation force and jointly construct a good and positive image of tourism destinations.In addition,the use of commentary adverbs,commentary markers"XP+的是"and evaluation sentences help advertisers highlight the features of tourism landscape in order to give tourists suggestions.The use of hyperboles,expressing subjective evaluation attitude through gradation,can strengthen,quantify and sharpen the evaluation of tourism resources,thus improving the force and intensity of evaluation.Chapter Eight explores the affect system of discourse.The study finds that a large number of positive affective words are used to express the feelings in order to arouse the positive response of tourists and construct a positive image of tourist destination;a small number of exclamatory sentences including degree adverbs,interrogative pronouns"多少、怎样"and demonstrative pronouns"这么、那么"are used not only to provide information,but also to highlight the value of tourist resources and share affect with potential tourists.From the perspective of rhythm and form,four-character phrases and parallel structures are the most important means of affective representation in tourism publicity discourse.While completing the semantic function,they also convey the speaker’s emotions with their neat form and distinct rhythm.Chapter Nine analyses the move structure and the distribution of subjective expressions in each step of tourism publicity discourse.Less distribution of subjective characteristics is found in the steps with objective information,while more is found in the steps with persuasive function.The steps with strong subjectivity are slightly higher in proportion than those with weak subjectivity.This distribution shows the strong subjectivity of tourism publicity discourse,but tourism advertisers try to keep a coordination and balance between subjectivity and objectivity of language in the discourse.Chapter Ten illustrates the relationship between the stylistic features and subjectivity of tourism publicity discourse,and proves that the degree of the speaker’s engagement in the process of discourse construction is the key to the subjectivity of discourse.The subjectivity system of a discourse performs the interpersonal function and constructs the interpersonal prosody model of the discourse,thus becoming one of the interpretative mechanisms of the stylistic features.