From phraseology to culture: qualifying adjectives in the language of tourism

This paper aims to describe the phraseology associated with adjectives in the language of tourism. The adjectives appearing in the word list of a British farmhouse holidays corpus were grouped into three different semantic fields (‘description of rooms’, ‘description of surroundings’, and ‘description of food’) and from which their collocational profiles were then identified. In order to compare and contrast the Italian and the British languages of tourism, we searched an Italian comparable agriturismi corpus for items that are used to describe rooms, food, and surroundings. The results are discussed with reference to Sinclair’s theories on the influence of context and register on language choices (Sinclair 1991), and Hall’s theory of high vs. low context cultures (Hall 1976, 1989; Katan 2003). This analysis shows that the language of tourism is highly phraseological. It also shows that although farmhouse holidays and agriturismi seem to be described as two equivalent concepts, farmhouse owners in different countries use different forms of promotion in their websites thus giving insights into some differences and similarities between English and Italian in terms of ‘language systems’ and cultural orientations. If we accept that language is an expression of culture, i.e. of the beliefs, customs, behaviours and rituals constituting the cultural identity of a group of people, then it is crucial that phraseology and cultural features are not separated in the analysis of meaning.