The criticism of tourism discourse as a type of specialised discourse rests mostly on the accessibility of its lexis, which is said to lack many of the distinguishing features of specialised vocabulary. This paper discusses the results of a study of the linguistic strategies for the description of space and spatial relations in English and Italian guidebooks. The picture emerging from parallel and comparable corpus data as well as from elicitation tasks seems to raise some challenging questions about the widely-accepted claims regarding preferences in the encoding of spatial information in English and Italian. It also appears to support the hypothesis that highly accessible lexical items can be used in a functionally specialised way and therefore act as distinctive features of tourism discourse, thereby contributing to its overall specialisation.

The tourist guide, a companion to a journey, exercises a sort of maternal function (Margarito 2000). However, it is also a device for the tourism industry to unambiguously control and lead the tourist towards specific destinations (Dann 1996). The present study will focus on the evolution of tourism texts from travel books to travel guides, from the detailed description of a destination with a thorough personal involvement of the writer to texts providing more accessible, practical and objective information. Tourist guides, mainly informative texts, ultimately promote a destination and persuade the traveller to undertake a certain journey. After introducing the concepts of the travel guide as a genre and its birth and evolution from travel literature, the present paper will focus on the main characteristics of the semiotic patterns and linguistic strategies present in a corpus of 19th-century travel books and of travel guides on the island of Sardinia.

When translating, some text types, such as tourist brochures, are particularly complex: the main communicative function of advertising, in fact, is the desire to influence people’s behaviours, by working at the level of personal values and beliefs (Katan 2004). For this reason, tourist translations should be effective not only in terms of communication but in terms of promoting. To do that, the identification of the phraseology typical of this type of language should not be separated from those aspects that are relevant for the particular culture we want to address. This paper aims to combine two different methodological approaches: the Corpus Linguistics approach within the framework of John Sinclair’s view of language (1991; 1996) and Tognini Bonelli’s theories on functionally complete units of meaning and the Intercultural Studies approach based on Hall’s ([1976] 1989), Hofstede’s (1991; 2001) and Katan’s theories (2004; 2006).

Tourism discourse is a type of specialised discourse (Cappelli 2006; Gotti 2006) typically characterised by stylistic choices and linguistic strategies of persuasion. In English promotional tourist websites suasion is specially achieved through metaphoric language use. This study investigates tourism metaphors within the framework of relevance-oriented lexical pragmatics (Wilson and Carston 2007, 2008; Sperber and Wilson 2008; Carston forthcoming). The primary aims of the study are to show that: a) metaphor is a subvariety of lexical broadening, and often combines with hyperbole to produce suasive effects; b) in tourist texts, metaphor interpretation does not always involve the construction of ad hoc concepts such as ‘paradise’, based on information made accessible by the encyclopaedic entry of the encoded concept; c) metaphors may be interpreted literally, and metarepresented to activate a mental image that evokes an imagined world (Davidson 1984; Levin 1993; Camp 2006).

The increase in public concern over environmental issues has led to a surge of environmental appeals through advertisements (Hansen 2002), in which advertisers make essential (mis-)use of the terms nature and natural (Harré, Brockmeier, Mühlhaüsler 1999). This research aims at revealing how nature and what is regarded as natural are described and employed by advertisers in British travel promotion texts in order to attract ecotourists. In particular, by tracing the discourses of nature through a corpus-based discourse analysis, the study investigates the meaning of the terms nature and natural in order to understand whether or not their usage in tourism advertising is deceptive. The results show that although the lexical items used to describe the natural world seem to express concern for the physical environment, the role of nature is limited. Indeed, the nature depicted in these travel promotion texts seems to be highly influenced by human beings. Nature is used as a recreational attraction and resource, the perfect setting for various activities and sports, while its preservation and respect on behalf of the ‘responsible’ tourist is marginal.

Keywords are those words “which fire the imagination […] not so much those which refer to the attributes of the destination but rather those which correspond to the requirements of the potential tourist” (Dann 1996: 74). This paper develops a methodology for analysing the process whereby a word changes its lexico-grammatical profile and is legitimately included among the tourism keywords. To this end, this study investigates the behaviour of two keywords, adventure and dream, in their migration from everyday language to the specialised language of tourism. The keywords analysed acquire, in the specialised corpus, a more concrete dimension linked to the planning and organisation of the holiday itself. They do not simply belong to the realm of abstraction, as in everyday language use, but in their journey towards the tourist language such keywords acquire a specific practical meaning linked to places, people and activities involved in the travel.

Nowadays, the formation of Tourism Destination Image can be shaped through the mediation between web tourists’ initial mental constructs and web-based promotional discourses. These encounters run the risk of being unbalanced by the social power of discursive agents used to constrain imagery and discourse processing. Such risks are even higher when web tourists have no/little organic images of less known destinations. This paper focuses on how these events contribute to promoting an induced Tourism Destination Image when online searches are performed for either real travel planning or virtual tourism. A qualitative study was conducted on samples promoting the southern Italian region of Calabria. Findings show that linguistic and visual features were manipulated to concur as subtle discursive agents through the use of psychological attributes. Intentional distortion of discourse was found to be facilitated by recipients’ trust, and by the absence of web ethics.

The World Tourism Organization has recently confirmed the tourism industry as one of the fastest growing sectors in international business markets. This rapid growth has resulted in an equally rapid transformation of the communication strategies employed by the tourism industry. The Internet has begun to be regarded as a dynamic source of information for both tourists and operators. This paper aims to discuss the strategies exploited by the tourist industry to structure web-texts where their main feature seems to be the careful selection and presentation of information designed to attract attention by paradoxically disturbing any process of predictable reading on the screen in a conventional way. The resulting multi- and hyper-modal peculiarities of tourism texts are clearly the consequence of a changing society where the dynamic interrelations between profit, new forms of (web)communication and the presence of emerging professional figures, as well as audiences, has profoundly influenced tourism discourse.

This article presents the concept of an “imaginaire dialectic”– a complex process of imagining and re-imagining places – by analysing how the Italian villages of Pietrelcina and San Giovanni Rotondo affect and are affected by tourist imaginaries, both materially and immaterially. The birthplace of the popular 20th century stigmatic saint, Padre Pio, Pietrelcina was “discovered” by tourists amid Pio’s canonisation fervor, and has now been rebuilt to conform to imaginaries of a “traditional” 19th century hill-town that served as a formative environment for the saint. But if Pietrelcina embraced some imaginaries, it also reacted against others. Arguing that the iconography promulgated by Pio’s shrine in San Giovanni Rotondo marginalises Pietrelcina, locals in the village respond with alternative re-presentations, such as biographies and images of Pio’s childhood. Contending that all groups involved produce and consume tourist imaginaries, this article reveals the productivity of examining the imaginaire dialectic when researching meaning-making mechanisms at tourist sites.

Nowadays tourism is a global industry whose growth seems to be constantly fostered by the widespread desire to search for and discover new countries and cultures. Yet, while being rooted in local reality, it is also leading to the emergence of new ‘hybrid’ forms created for domestic purposes as much as tourist consumption (Meethan 2001: 115). This paper will focus on the creation and tourist promotion of one of these ‘hybrid’ forms: Italy in the United States, by which no reference is intended to the numerous instances of Little Italy scattered across the US, but rather to the annual Columbus Day Parade held on Fifth Avenue in New York on the second Monday in October. As tourists participate in a cluster of cultural representations and linguistic signs, the dominant mental and social constructions shaping Italy and the Italian-American heritage will be explored through a discourse analysis of the language used by online media (whether they be travelblogs, online newspapers, online tourist guidebooks or websites) that relate the event.