Verbal Techniques of the Language of Tourism Across Cultures: An Analysis of Five Official Tourist Websites

This paper aims to analyse the verbal techniques which are more frequently used in tourism discourse, that is to say comparison, key words and keying, testimony, languaging, and ego-targeting (Dann, 1996). In order to do that, five official websites have been chosen for analysis, namely the websites which promote the USA, Canada, Australia, Great Britain, and Italy as tourist destinations. The linguistic content available on these websites has been downloaded and five comparable corpora have been assembled and analysed through WordSmith Tool 6.0 software for linguistic analysis (Scott, 2012). The methodological approach adopted combines the Corpus Linguistics approach with Cross-cultural studies models, in order to extract quantitative data and to interpret them from a linguistic and cultural perspective (Manca, 2016a). The aim of these analyses is to show that, although these techniques are all peculiar of tourism discourse, they are employed with different frequencies by the five languages/cultures with relevant implications for cross-cultural tourist communication.