The Language of Tourists in English and Italian Travel Blogs and Trip Reports: a Corpus-based Analysis

Abstract

Over the last few decades there has been wide interest in linguistic and cultural mediation in tourist communication as a result of the growth of global tourism. Linguistic research in this field has mainly focused on the linguistic features of mediatised representations, such as brochures, websites and guidebooks. It is only very recently that some scholars have started to discuss the contribution of traveller-generated content to the linguistic and cultural mediation in the language of tourism. This study explores the language used by ordinary travellers through a corpus-based analysis of travel blogs and trip reports to show to what extent the ‘tourist gaze’ is shaped and mediatised by the tourist industry and how tourism can emerge through tourists’ mediated actions and remediated practices. The results also demonstrate that what tourists actually do and gaze at a site may be used to mediate tourist texts across different cultures.