Tourism discourse: professional, promotional and digital voices

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, designed to attract as many customers as possible in order to make a profit. Therefore, in order to sell the same product to different targets and on different markets, tourist organizations need to develop different types of information, namely, different genres presenting, in adequate and convincing linguistic ways, the same content with the same illocutionary purpose. This is linguistically attained thanks to the elaboration of different voices – professional, promotional and digital – which employ rhetorical strategies complying with the use of particular lexical items, specific syntactical structures and precise textual levels of the language employed. By integrating genre analysis with corpus linguistics, this volume aims to investigate if and to what extent the voices of tourism discourse dynamically reflect the new societal trends. The results suggest that the pressure of societal transformations is reflected in tourism discourse insomuch as it seems to have developed new linguistic strategies when tourism is used for both specialized and promotional purposes. In other words, tourism discourse seems to be permeated by the rise of a new hypertextual mode of communication and, particularly in its promotional and digital features, by a language that while euphorically describing the destination seems to convey the idea that the tourist is solely responsible for his or her choice of off-the-beaten-track destination.