Communicating Sustainable Tourism in English and Italian: A Contrastive Analysis

Abstract

Sustainable tourism has become a popular field of research over the last decades; yet, while acknowledging that sustainable tourism requires communication strategies different from those of mainstream tourism, scholars have paid little attention to this area of language. Based on two parallel corpora, this study explores the discursive representation of sustainable tourism in web communication in English and in Italian. The methodological framework adopted is that of Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies. The analysis suggests that the Italian representation of sustainable tourism is characterized by a distant stance towards readers and relies on a strong polarization between ‘good’ tourism and ‘bad’ tourism. Communication in English instead relies on proximal person deixis and on the creation of value around responsible tourism by means of factual information rather than on mere evaluation.