Discourse Analysis Of Tour-guide English From Systemic-functional And Pragmatic Approaches

With the implementation of open policy in the last two decades, Chinese people have been in frequent and wide contact with people from other countries in every field. This enables English, which is usually considered as an international language, to be widely used in the service sector, especially in the travel industry. As a result, many linguists begin to put their eyes on the study of a special professional language — the tour-guide English. However, present studies mainly focus on the tour-guide English from perspectives of either pragmatic failure or cross-culture communication, which emphasize the practical application of this professional discourse. There seems little attention or even study from pragmatic principles and systemic-functional perspectives.In this thesis I attempt to make discourse analysis of tour-guide English by taking some theories of Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar, Grice's Cooperative Principle, Leech's Politeness Principle and Brown & Levinson' Face Theory, then summarize some characteristics of this special professional discourse and give some useful suggestions, which should be of great help to tour-guides in their work.The general characteristics of the tour-guide English are as follows:1. The style of the tour-guide English can be regarded as the combination ofdescription and argumentation.2. The information contained in the tour-guide English is required to be accurate and reliable.3. The language used by tour-guides should be appropriate, that is, be gentle andpolite.