A Genre Analysis Of English Tourist Information Texts On The Internet

Genre analysis, which is regarded as a new development in discourse analysis, has attracted much attention from linguists and applied linguists.Tourist information texts (TITs) on the internet are an increasingly important and frequent communicative publicity literature, which have been playing a major role in tourism publicity campaign but subject to criticism due to its poor quality as well.Thus comes the study of tourist information texts on the internet reported in this dissertation, which falls into the domain of applied genre analysis. Based on a corpus of 15 tourist information texts collected from some native, official or professional travel websites on the internet, namely, grand canyon from fodors, Cardiff from trafalgar, etc, and following Swales and Bhatia's move models as well as Hasan's notion of Generic Structural Potential (GSP), the study aims to identify the move structure chosen by the expert users of the tourist information texts on the internet to realize their communicative purposes, probe into the reasons behind these choices made by those expert users to achieve their ends by combining psycholinguistic, socio-cultural aspects of text-construction and interpretation with linguistic insights and shed light on the production of quality English tourist information texts in China.Major findings of the study firstly show that tourist information texts on the internet, as a promotional genre, serve the communicative purposes of capturing the potential tourists'attention, introducing the knowledge of the destination to the interested tourists, griping their attention tightly, retaining their enthusiasm, convincing them of the worthiness of purchasing the tourism products and services being promoted and eventually inducing them to act by attracting, informing and persuading. Moreover, the communicative purposes as well as some inputs from multi-disciplines determine the structural pattern of this genre text to a large extent, which can be typically classified into nineteen specified moves with two obligatory moves, identification as well as indicating value, and seventeen optional moves in a GSP model. And lastly, implications for writing and teaching of the tourist information text as well as teaching and studying of other professional genres are put forward.