(In)authentic Tourist Attractions: How Chinese Tourists Perceive Russian “Fakelore”

Abstract

The study investigates the concept of authenticity empirically as constructed by Chinese tourists when they visit tourist attractions in Russia with distinct ethnic or local attributes. The corpus of tourists’ reviews has been examined, using a corpus-assisted methodology supported by Wmatrix. A linguistic level of authenticity representation appears to be only a source domain for the conceptual construction of authenticity. Chinese tourists reflect on outer ‘objective’ attributes of authenticity to construct an authenticity of another type. These mental constructs are organized based on the primary ontological and spatial experience. Semantic categories serve as a conceptual source domain that organizes a target domain. The findings show a Chinese tourist conceptualizes authenticity through the metaphors of primary experience, including time-space orientation — PLACE IS A FAR DISTANCE, PAST IS BACK, GOOD IS UP and an ontological metaphor — A TOURED OBJECT IS A CONTAINER. The content of a container is qualified and quantified through a conceptual metaphor of AUTHENTICATING IS LEARNING A CONTAINER. A container is qualified as THE SUPERNATURAL IS A MAGIC PERSON and quantified by a conceptual metaphor UNUSUAL IS LESS.