TOURISM TERMS IN ENGLISH TRAVEL DISCOURSE TEXTS: LINGUOCULTURAL PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

The article deals with the issues of cultural peculiarities of English tourism terms in travel discourse texts. The starting point of the study is the fact that tourism terminology system is open, which is caused by the popularity of international tourism and the dynamic development of this branch itself. English tourism terminology now is being scientifically thought over and developing all the time, which underlines the topicality of the research. Due to the specific inhomogeneous nature of tourism terminology, lexical units have been divided into thematic groups on the basis of their sphere of usage. But scholars don’t take into account cultural peculiarities of terms, which nominate cultural realias of a definite country being its cultural symbols, as they are components of the excursion sphere of their functioning. Besides, the possibility of appearance of new terms has been not taken into consideration either. The purpose of the article is to investigate English tourism terms through the prism of their cultural and functional nature. The article is focused on the stages of tourism development and some new its types have been pointed out, such as military, gastronomic, getto-tourism, cinema tourism, dark tourism). In the frame of English tourism terminology six basic microfields have been distinguished. They represent traditional branches in the tourism sphere. Such microfields consists of a definite number of lexico-semantic groups, which unite terms on the basis of common thematic features. The results of the study can be summarised as follows: English tourism terms in travel discourse texts are divided into such groups as: common objects (nominations of objects of everyday life), anthroponomic (names of districts, festivals, sports events), geographic (names of geographic places) and terms-realia. Among the functions of English tourism terms we distinguish: 1) the function of presenting the world through a special cultural prism, 2) the function of preserving and transmitting national mentality, culture, traditions, national history; 3) nominative function.