A Comparative Study Of Traveling Texts By Native And Chinese Writers From A Functional Stylistic Perspective

Text analysis, as one of the branches of linguistics has been developed in recent years. Many scholars have done a lot of researches in this field and published many articles. However, comparative text analysis hasn't been paid much attention to until 1980s and it is very important to seek appropriate linguistic theories as its tool. Moreover, the comparison of English traveling texts written respectively by native and Chinese writers is still a gap.Therefore, the present study makes an attempt to compare traveling texts written by native English writers and by Chinese writer, with Functional Stylistics as a tool, and China and The Sights of China as corpus data, to find the similarities and differences of textual properties between them and to testify the applicability and effectiveness of Functional Stylistics in comparative text analysis.Functional Stylistics is a branch of modern Stylistics. In the broad sense, it refers to the stylistic theories taking all the functions of language as their basis to explore style of language. Functional linguistics is the basis of this kind of theories. In the narrow sense, functional stylistics takes SFL as its theoretical basis. The present study is prone to adopt the latter point of view and take Functional Stylistics as the theoretical basis to make a comparative analysis of traveling texts by native and Chinese writers. Functional Stylistics pays attention to language functions and different language structures determined by different language functions, such as thematic structure, transitivity and focus on the stylistic effects produced by different language structures.According to Halliday, text is a semantic unit. It must satisfy three conditions: generic structure, textual structure (including thematic structure and information structure) and cohesion. Later, Hu Zhuanglin and Zhang Delu & Liu Rushan developed his ideas, arguing that mood structure and transitivity structure can also become one part of textual structure.From the angle of contextual analysis, we discussed register and generic structure. Three elements: Name, Resources and History are obligatory in texts written by native English writers, while in texts written by Chinese, there are two obligatory elements: Name and Description. In addition, these two versions of traveling texts have some common and different optional stages and their positions in the texts are often different.From the perspective of semantic analysis, the two versions of texts present similar thematic structure, including similar markedness and unmarkedness and Constant Theme Pattern, but a little different in multiple themes and Linear Theme Pattern. The comparison of the information structure shows that the frequency of Given plus New structure in English is similar in both traveling texts. Given information is often reiterated through reference and lexical cohesion in English, but often realized in Chinese through reference, lexical cohesion and conjunction. Then for the mood structure, these two versions of traveling texts employ declarative mood to provide information to the readers, but in texts written by native English writers imperative mood is also allowed to tell readers information concerning traveling, which is the character of low-context culture language and embodiment of multiple-culture of English. For transitivity structure, traveling texts written by native English writers achieve their coherence mainly by material processes and relational process, whereas traveling texts written by Chinese are mainly by relational processes. In these two versions of traveling texts, lexical cohesions are the main cohesive ties. What makes difference is texts written by native English writers depends more on references and ellipsis, while texts written by Chinese more conjunction to construct text. The study shows that text with cohesion is not necessarily coherent; nevertheless, cohesion is a very important means of achieving coherence. Coherent text is represented by some formal features in such aspects as textual structure and cohesion. All in all, these two versions of traveling texts have more similarities than distinctions.The research also indicates that Functional Stylistics is really an applicable and effective method of comparative text analysis and that mood structure and transitivity structure are also parts of textual structure, contents of text analysis.