Harmonious Attitudinal Prosody

As is often said,'Being told about the sights is more enjoyable than sightseeing'. Along with the development of tourism, tour guides'service becomes more and more important, within which tour guides'commentary is one of the most important issues. Tour guide commentary, which is supposed to be lively and appealing, refers to the language used by tour guides to communicate with tourists, guide tours, and spread cultural information. As a communicative tool in tourism and as an institutional language, tour guide commentary has drawn attention of many of social linguists. Many researches have been made on tourism discourse, most of which deal with tourism discourse translation or comparisons amongst different versions in terms of language. Additionally some researches focus on tour guides'linguistic skills. However, there are not many studies that explore tour guide commentary as a discourse from a systemic-functional linguistic perspective.In this paper, we intend to explore this topic from the perspective of positive discourse analysis and to explain how the tour guide aligns tourists with tour guide commentary to publicize scenic spots and culture. Since positive discourse analysis is a newly developed approach without any fixed model, we integrate Genre Theory, Appraisal Theory and Prosody Theory as the theoretical foundations, on the basis of which an attitudinal prosody analyzing model is shaped.To ensure the representativeness, our research data come from three sources: transcription of the tour guides'language, resources from tourism forum online and tour guide commentaries collected in books.We adopt a general discourse analysis method in this paper. A qualitative method is applied. Additionally, when necessary the data are analyzed quantitatively to verify the reported results. We first give our hypothesis, and then test them with induction and deduction. Therefore, our research procedure is: hypothesis—observation—acceptance /refutation—search for model—primary conclusion. In the light of preliminary observation and research, we propose the following hypotheses:(1) Tour guide commentary is a kind of genre which has specific generic structure, including Welcome Stage, General Introduction Stage, Specific Commentary Stage, Evaluation Stage and Send-off Stage.(2) Attitudinal Prosodic Structure is a general hierarchical structure which has some common features. And the attitudinal prosodic movements of tour guide commentary have special features.(3) The internal mechanism of Attitudinal Prosodic Structure is three general modes of attitudinal prosody—the modes of wave, dispersion and scalar homeostatic flowing in discourse, making it a harmonious unity.These hypotheses are validated via further observation and statistical analysis. Our research shows that tour guide commentary is one form of the institutional language. It is a staged, goal oriented, social process with special generic structure. Its stages are: Welcome, General Introduction, Specific Commentary, Evaluation and Send-off. Every stage is composed of different phases, which themselves include different messages. Stages are comparatively stable, but phases and messages vary according to different contexts. To align tourists, tour guides move or sympathize with them through emotional expressions. In Welcome and Send-off Stages,'Affect'resources are employed by tour guides to reduce the isolation from tourists while in General Introduction, Specific Commentary and Evaluation Stages,'Appreciation'resources are employed to familiarize tourists with the destination. Through sharing their feelings with tourists, tour guides show the aesthetic facets of the sites so that tourists can enjoy their tour. Attitudinal prosody concerning this emotion and value is a hierarchical structure with its own specific mechanism. The structure of attitudinal prosody is composed of the attitudinal prosodic unit, the attitudinal prosodic phase and the attitudinal prosodic stage. In discourse, the attitudinal stages shift from one to another till they reach the communicative goal. In tour guide commentary, this shift first flows from Affect prosodic stage to Appreciation prosodic stage and then down to the Affect prosodic stage. These shifts are not simple circulation but prosodies. In the attitudinal prosodic phase, different subtypes of attitude serve one attitude. Each attitudinal prosodic unit can be divided into positive or negative parts, or in another perspective, explicit or implicit ones. No matter what kind of attitude it belongs to, it serves one motif or goal, which is applied to align the value position of the tourists. The mechanism of attitudinal prosody includes three modes: dispersion, wave and scalar. The three modes, owning the character of homeostasis, flow in the discourse to make it a harmonious unity.This paper is designed to progress from general to specific, intending to test our hypothesis and to achieve new findings. The following is the organization of this thesis:Chapter One introduces the topic and defines the basic concepts. It also presents the research motivation and the background of the study followed by the objective, hypotheses, data, research method and purpose. Finally it describes the organization of the paper.Chapter Two is a literature review, including critical discourse analysis, positive discourse analysis, a contrast between critical and positive discourse analysis, and a proposal of a theory of studying attitudinal prosody in tour guide commentary from the perspective of positive discourse analysis.Chapter Three presents the theoretical framework, introducing Genre Theory, Appraisal Theory and Prosody Theory. It builds up our analyzing model which has five steps: verifying generic strucutre, tagging attitudinal resources, measuring attitudinal resources, analyzing attitudinal prosody and discussing results, which provide the theoretical framework for attitudinal prosodic analysis.Chapter Four analyzes tour guide commentary with the attitudinal analyzing model to test the hypotheses proposed in the first chapter, making clear the specific generic structure of tour guide commentary and the internal mechanism of attitudinal prosody.Chapter Five is the conclusion, in which findings are summarized and significance of the present study is shown, and advice of the author is also given for future research.