Corpus-based Stylistic Analysis of Tourism English

Abstract

Tourism English belongs to the English for Specific Purpose (ESP) and it has its own stylistic features. This paper aims at analyzing the stylistic features of tourism English. Firstly, a large amount of authentic materials are collected from official tourism websites of Britain and the U.S., and then a corpus named Tourism English Corpus (TEC) is compiled. Freiburg-LOB Corpus of British English (FLOB) is used as the reference corpus to make comparisons. The results indicate that TEC has its own stylistic features. The average word length of TEC is a little longer than that of FLOB. As for the lexical density, there is no significant difference between the two corpora. The distribution of content words shows that content words of TEC overweigh that of FLOB with the facts that nouns are the most frequently used in both corpora and there are more nouns and adjectives but less verbs, proverbs, and pronouns in TEC. Moreover, a larger quantity of proper nouns, scenic nouns, nouns of direction, descriptive adjectives with positive meaning, general superlative adjectives, and frequent use of verbs with the meaning of visiting and enjoying are employed in TEC. Lastly, the average sentence length of TEC is shorter than that of FLOB. All these contribute to the distinctive features of tourism English. It is hoped that the research could enrich the study of tourism English and promote the translation and learning of tourism English.