4 New Perspectives in Language and Communication Research
An example of ‘homogenized syntax’ is the one found in the
cookery book, where Enkvist posts that ‘cookery-book writers who
make good use of structures such as into a large kettle put x, y and z.
this is obviously short for first take a large kettle and then put it into
x, y and z…. That cookery-book writers strive for conciseness can
be seen not in their profiting from iconicity but also in the frequent
object deletion, and of course in the traditionally formulaic disposition
(Enkvist 1991: 11).
Most importantly, readers should share the basic conventions
of a certain discourse so that they are able to understand the text
read, for example, in order to understand a cookery book, one needs
to know the styles in which it is written, the language and specific
conventions used (Enkvist 1991). This thus means that different
text types employ different syntactic conventions depending on the
common social practices (Faircloug 1992).
3 TOURISM PROMOTIONAL STRATEGIES
A tourist guide book could in principle be written with many strategies:
a chronological strategy arranging sights by age; a biographical
strategy arranging the sights by the persons they have associations
with, an architectural strategy grouping sights by building styles: and
so forth. Here the writer wanted to take his readers on a guided tour,
and his strategy might be defined as “stop-look-see”: first the tourist
should know where to go and stop, and next where to look. Only then
can he be told what he is in fact seeing (Enkvist 1991: 9). Following
this, in this study we were interested to determine the strategy or the
style adopted by Malaysian Tourism Board in promoting Malaysia.
Interestingly, this stop-look-see strategy is reflected in the
syntax that is ‘through fronting of locative adverbials: the pattern
is in location x is y rather than y is in location x (Enkvist 1991: 9).
The information flow, according to Enkvist, can be achieved in two
ways, which are passivisation and nominalisation of the locative.