English Tourism Discourse

Insights into the professional, promotional and digital language of tourism

Stefania M. Maci

• Publisher: Hoepli
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9788820399580
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: English Language
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In the last few decades, the rapid growth of the demand-supply processes in the travel sector has caused a dramatic development of the tourism industry. In order to sell the same product to different targets and on different markets, tourist organizations need to develop different genres presenting the same content with the same illocutionary purpose. This is linguistically attained thanks to the elaboration of professional, promotional and digital forms of discourse which employ rhetorical strategies complying with the use of particular lexical items, specific syntactical structures and precise textual levels of the language employed. By combining corpus linguistics and genre analysis, this volume aims to investigate if and to what extent tourism discourse dynamically reflects those new societal trends that have caused any development of the tourism industry. The results suggest that tourism discourse seems to have developed new linguistic strategies in both specialized and promotional purposes, characterized by the rise of a new hypertextual mode of communication euphorically describing the destination and conveying the idea that tourists are solely responsible for their choice of off-the-beaten-track destination. This volume, primarily aimed at undergraduate and postgraduate students, may also be of interest to any researchers or scholars interested in tourism discourse from a sociosemiotics perspective and discourse analysis. The corpus-based approach makes this the ideal introduction for all students and scholars interested in tourism discourse.

Tourism promotional discourse

4. Tourism promotional discourse

As we have seen in the Introduction of this volume, the dynamic structure of society is closely reflected in discourse, which means that in order to carry out any linguistic analysis of this issue, all background information has to be taken into consideration (Wodak 2006: 15). All (specialized) texts have a hidden skeleton forming the textual pattern of the document. The type of skeleton concealed in the (specialized) text affects the type of conceptual, rhetorical and linguistic aspects that are a feature of the text itself (Gotti 2006: 31; cf also Nesi and Gardner 2012): a close relationship is thus established between the type of text and its structure. In other words, the pragmatic function of the document under investigation determines the choice of the conventional framework characterizing the textual genre. The close relationship between the genre adopted and the text influences its conceptual and rhetorical expansion and the linguistic choices made in the elaboration of the text itself.

In order to categorize textual typologies within tourism discourse, the pragmatic function of the text has been investigated, allowing an open classification of tourism texts, as listed in the Introduction. Of course, this conveniently labels texts and genres. Nevertheless, precisely because of the societal dynamism hinted at above, we have to bear in mind that tourism text types are hybrid genres which share various linguistic and discursive strategies belonging to other genres and thus exploit interdiscursivity (Bhatia 2007). Furthermore, such dynamism seems to have a dominant role in the elaboration of genres which embed more than one code and therefore resort to multimodality. This is particularly true in tourism texts whose main purpose is that of promoting a destination. Indeed, as Dann (1996: 2) claims,

tourism, in the act of promotion, as well as in the accounts of its practitioners and clients, has a discourse of its own. Seen in this light, the language of tourism is thus a great deal more than a metaphor. Via static and moving pictures, written texts and audio-visual offerings, the language of tourism attempts to persuade, lure, woo and seduce millions of human beings, and, in doing so, convert them from potential into actual clients.

According to Dann (2006), four major theoretical approaches are generally adopted by scholars in order to understand the language of tourism and tourism itself as a social phenomenon: the authenticity approach, the strangehood approach, the play approach, and the conflict approach.

The authenticity approach emerged during the 1970s-1980s and derived from criticisms of the tourism industry, which considered tourism as being based solely on escapist fantasy. From the perspective of authenticity, the motivation behind tourism is a search for authenticity (McCannel 1977). The language of tourism enhances the impression of authenticity through abundant explicit expressions (MacCannel 1979; Dann 1996) describing what is native and typical of the destination. This authenticity, however, is only fictitious because the real destination has been greatly manipulated and commercialized for the sake of developing tourism, to such an extent that the location is reduced to simply offering a few attractions of an almost semiotic and symbolic nature. For example, if a potential tourist wishes to visit a destination such as Venice, he or she is exposed to numerous verbal or visual representations of the city’s best-known sights – St. Mark’s Square, the Rialto Bridge, the Bridge of Sighs –, which have become symbols of the town and which are widely represented by textual descriptions in tourism brochures, in TV documentaries, on the Internet, etc; therefore, on actually seeing Venice, the individual’s preconceived idea of authenticity is in contrast with reality and previously acquired conceptions of the place may be shattered.

The strangehood approach emphasizes the search for something different and for new experiences as being the driving force behind travel (Dann 1996: 12-17). The desire for something new and exotic is reflected in the language of tourism, mainly in descriptions of places and people. For instance, when analyzing promotional literature concerning tourism in Thailand, Cohen (1983) identifies the qualifying adjectives: ‘untouched [by civilization]’, ‘remote and unspoilt’, ‘colourful’, ‘picturesque’, ‘quaint’, ‘fascinating’, ‘almost unknown’, ‘newly discovered’, all of which contribute to the image of novelty and strangeness of the offered destination. In this perspective, too, the comments of tourists on the destination forms a discursive background contributing to arousing potential tourists’ expectations of the location itself. In other words, the tourists’ verbal accounts of their holiday experience placed on the Internet are not merely a feedback to the services provided but also show that comments and opinions may be consulted before the actual experience is decided on.

The play approach is usually identified with Cohen’s concept (1984) of the recreational tourist. Its main feature is the search for the out-of-the-ordinary when travelling. In this sense, tourism itself is seen as a game. This approach provides tourists with experiences which do not often match up with the cultural and environmental conditions of the visited destinations: the play perspective often avoids any contact by the visitor with the native culture. Indeed, what is important is the spectacle (Urry 1990) and, as a result, holiday resorts compete in providing a variety of visual experiences. People are prepared for what they will see by the media and by tourism communication channels, which, to a large extent, create in the tourists’ minds a place in which they can ‘live’ a holiday experience and what such a place offers. An example of a visual transformation into the unreal is the Disneyland resorts all around the world, which take visitors not only to an imaginary world of fairy tales and cartoon characters but also to different historical periods (the American West in the 1800s) and to different parts of the world (a jungle, a deserted island, the South Pacific): immediately on his or her arrival, for the visitor the show begins.

According to Dann (1996), the conflict approach originated in 1978 with the work of Edward Said, who wished to explore how the West and the East met (Orientalism). According to this scholar, the world appears to be divided between the familiar (us) and the strange (them, the Others). The strangeness of what is exotic can be played down through language. Therefore language aims to make what is unknown become less fearsome and dangerous, and sets it in some form of representation of great figures of the past. The discourse connected to this becomes a set of stereotypes. In this perspective, language is not even trying to be accurate, but declares that things are real because it places them in a context of timelessness. This language does not describe, it reconstructs, reassembles and shapes the unknown.

The four perspectives presented and described in the course of this chapter have different theoretical points of departure but may converge where there is a shared appreciation of the importance of language. They might even be present simultaneously in complex text types, according to the message conveyed and to the kind of tourist being addressed. For this reason, in the following chapters the promotional tourism genres presented will be taken into consideration following perspectives concerning pre-holiday plans (ads, brochures and catalogues), travel to the holiday destination (itineraries, inflight magazines), and activities during the holiday (guidebooks), rather than according to the social approach described above.

4.1 Corpus collection and methodological approach

Given the great number of tourist documents, the genres and texts to be analysed have been selected very carefully, on the premise that reliability and international accreditation should be the main criterion for collection. I therefore decided to use the documents (tourism advertisements, guidebooks, brochures, leaflets, itineraries, tickets, inf...