The Language of Tourism

The rapid growth of the travel demand in the last few decades has required an even more rapid transformation of the tourism industry, designed to attract as many customers as possible in order to make a profit. Recently, and mainly in recognition of the fact that in order to promote the same product successfully to different targets it has to be presented in adequate and convincing linguistic ways, investigations have concentrated on the linguistic tools employed in the tourism industry. Yet the dynamism of society, strictly reflected in discourse which is socially constructed rather than naturally determined, implies the necessity to integrate background information while analysing and interpreting texts. This volume aims to investigate the language of tourism discourse dynamically reflecting the new societal trends, and the way in which the latter have modified tourism genres. By integrating genre analysis with corpus linguistics, the author will seek to illustrate when and how generic integrity is maintained in tourism genres, and when and how conventions or resources associated with other genres are appropriated by some domains. The results suggest that the pressure of societal transformations is mirrored in tourism discourse insomuch as it seems to have developed new linguistic strategies when tourism is used for both promotional and specialized purposes. In other words, precisely because the tourism industry is a very dynamic sector, also due to the economic processes affecting its context, tourism discourse seems to be interdiscursively characterized by on-going linguistic and generic developments