Caffè macchiato grande, Bambini and Casoni: languaging in the text genre of travel guides

Abstract

Abstract This article deals with languaging, a manifestation of language contact often found in tourism communication. It is understood as the use of local language in tourism texts written in the language of the tourists. After a review of previous research on languaging and its functions within tourism communication and on the contact linguistic status of languaging units and their mediation in the text, an analysis of a corpus consisting of four general German guidebooks on the northern Italian region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia is carried out with regard to how the examples of languaging found therein are distributed between the different guides and within each guidebook. Previous studies have already pointed out that the distribution in the guides is not uniform. The analysis is based on the work on text genres by Fandrych and Thurmair, according to which travel guides are large texts with four subtext genres, namely orientation texts, sightseeing texts, advice texts and in-depth texts, each of which fulfils certain dominant functions, has certain linguistic structures and deals with certain topics. The research questions posed are: what is the quantitative distribution of languaging evidence in the analysed guidebooks, and do certain semantic-functional types of languaging occur preferentially or even exclusively in certain subtext genres?