Virtual Touring: The Web-Language Of Tourism

The World Tourism Organization defines tourism as one of the fastest growing economic sectors in the world: the business volume of tourism has surpassed that of oil export, food products and automobiles. Tourism has thus gained an ever-increasing importance and acquired a prominent position in international business markets. This aspect has promoted extensive research on tourism from various fields of economics, geography, sociology, psychology and anthropology. However, little attention has been devoted to tourism from a linguistic perspective because of the difficulty in perceiving its language as different from general discourse. As a matter of fact, this is the impression that the language of tourism gives when targeting a wider audience than tourist-industry specialists. However, in-depth linguistic analysis provides a different picture. This paper aims to discuss the strategies exploited by the tourist industry to structure texts into specific genres, carefully combining features that derive from both the iconic and the verbal codes. The study, based on a corpus of English texts taken from the web-pages of tourist offices located mainly in the UK investigates in what ways such texts achieve strong generic coherence by successfully fulfilling the encoder’s intentions, contextual exigencies and structural linguistic rules, thus outlining how the registers of tourism discourse are organised.