A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Web-Page Based Tourist Information Text

As a promotional tool, the genre of tourist information text (TIT) is a sub-variety of tourism promoting literature with the aim of providing information for prospective customers, and ultimately persuading them to buy their products. With the development of new technologies, especially the multimedia technology, the channel of getting tourist information has greatly changed and the websites become a major one. The web-page based TIT is multimodal by nature with the involvement and interaction of various semiotic resources in the meaning-making process while past studies on this genre are mainly monomodal ones. The gap between the reality and theories inspires the exploration of the multimodal features of TIT in this thesis.Multimodal discourse analysis (MDA) is a new branch of discourse analysis, investigating the meaning-making process with the combination and interplay of various semiotic resources. As an effective approach, the multimodal discourse analysis has been applied in printed pages, hypertexts as well as three-dimensional material objects. Rather than focus on one semiotic mode, the multimodal discourse analysis studies the meaning-making mechanism and the intersemiotic complementarity.Thirty web-page based tourist information texts (TIT) are collected from official tourism websites, which is further divided into two subcorpora:fifteen tourist information texts in Chinese and fifteen in English accordingly derived from the tourism websites in China and abroad. The theoretical framework is based on Janet Jones'two-stage multimodal discourse analysis (MDA): a quantitative MCA and a qualitative MDA. Stage one (MCA) mainly explores the multimodal semiotic features of TIT while stage two (MDA) investigates the mechanism of intersemiotic complementarity. The two stages employ a different but complementary methodology, providing a comprehensive and thorough analysis of the multimodal web-based tourism information texts. Based on the two stage analysis of MCA and MDA, the following conclusions could be derived.First, concerning the semiotic features of web-page based TIT, the discourses employ much more ideational and interpersonal semiotic resources compared with the textual ones. Besides, the visual and verbal modes are imbalanced distributed among those three metafunctions. To be specific, the ideational and interpersonal metafunctions are accustomed to use visual semiotics as their major means of expression while the textual meanings employ more verbal ones.Second, as for the comparison between the two sub corpus, they show a roughly dynamic correspondence in terms of metafunctional distribution of semiotic modes, even though the two sub-varities are discourses with different languages. In spite of their great consistence in metafunctional distribution of semiotics, these two sub corpus may foreground the same metafunctional meanings with different semiotic resources.Third, in terms of the mechanism of intersemiotic complementarity, the intersemiotic sense relations of correspondence, repetition, hyponymy and meronymy are adopted to relate the web pages as a unity whole. Especially the cohesive tie of correspondence is frequently used in tourism discourses. On the one hand, the correspondent semiotic modes often talk about the same thing from different perspectives, as a result, the relatively comprehensive and thorough information can be provided for the potential customers; on the other hand, the sense relation of correspondence can relate different sub sections, organizing the whole web pages to be a coherent one.