Balancing Tourism Promotion and Professional Discourse: A Corpus-based Analysis of Digital Travel Guidebooks Promoting Venice in English

The city of Venice is currently promoted through a wide range of channels, either traditional or innovative, using the Internet as their main ‘market place’. Besides Italian, the promotional message is conveyed in English as the main foreign language of communication, addressing not only perspective tourists from English-speaking countries but also tourists of other mother tongues who use English to communicate outside their country. Considering the multifaceted nature of the language in the field of tourism that balances domain-specific and general terms, the present study investigates the language that is used to ‘sell’ the city of Venice, a complex tourist destination, to international perspective visitors. By means of corpus linguistics methods of analysis, the study investigates the lexico-grammatical features present in a corpus of digital travel guidebooks, written in English, that are accessible on the Internet. The corpus, purposely collected and annotated, is examined in order to understand how the most peculiar aspects of Venice and its local culture are described to visitors, taking into particular consideration the strategies used by the authors to balance technical terms typical of the language of tourism with promotional terms that might contain specific connotations to attract the readers’ attention.