Communicating the Image of Venice: The Use of Discourse Markers in Websites and Digital Travel Guidebooks In English

The study investigates a corpus of websites and digital travel guidebooks – collected in a corpus – that promote the city of Venice using English as a lingua franca to convey the promotional message. The study examines a corpus of texts already used in three previous contributions to conduct a more detailed analysis of the stylistic features present in the digital texts. The aim is to understand how the promotional message is conveyed to a varied audience who has different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. In particular, it is here investigated the use of discourse markers (DMs), and their semantic and pragmatic relationships with respect to the context of occurrence. To do so, Bruce Fraser’s definition and classification of DMs will be used to analyse the corpus. Results show that the DMs investigated share the common pragmatic function of ‘topic orientation markers’, i.e., they signal an aspect of the organization of the ongoing discourse. Semantically, however, they have different – but very specific – relationships with the surrounding segments of discourse. More specifically, the authors of the texts preferably use DMs to signal that a warning, a reminder, or some advice, will follow in the next segment.