Representing the Veneto Region to English-Speaking Tourists: A Diachronic Corpus-Driven Investigation of Tourist Promotional Brochures Produced between the 1920s and the 1940s.

ABSTRACT The decades between the 1920s and the 1940s in Italy were marked by significant historical- political events: the consequences of World War I, the rise of the Fascist regime, and the events that would lead to World War II. Despite this period of unrest, the state tourism agency, Ente Nazionale per le Industrie Turistiche (ENIT), continued to produce a large volume of promotional material (such as brochures) in Italian and in several languages, including English, targeting international visitors whose foreign currency was crucial to the national economy. This study investigates a corpus of brochures to understand how the projected destination image (Hunter 2016) of the Veneto region was constructed during these critical historical decades. To do so, the research conducts a quantitative and a qualitative investigation on a purposely compiled corpus of 26 brochures produced in English between the 1920s and the 1940s. Using WordSmith Tools Version 8 (Scott 2022), a Keyword Analysis is performed to identify statistically relevant discursive patterns, followed by a qualitative investigation on the contexts in which these keywords occur in the corpus to interpret the tourist promotional strategies behind these patterns. The findings are interpreted and critically discussed by drawing on the notion of destination image construction, a well-known strategy in tourism studies (Hunter 2016). Then, results are further examined considering the specific historical period(s) during which the brochures were published, thereby interpreting results diachronically and exploring whether historical events influenced the way in which the Veneto region was promoted to international English-speaking prospective tourists. The quantitative analysis of the corpus confirmed its high degree of specialisation, displaying high Standardised Type-Token Ratio (STTR) and a high mean sentence length, compared to the reference corpus used (written component of the BNC). These stylistic features demonstrate the adoption of an elaborate, highly persuasive discourse structure typical of materials designed to influence pre-visit decision-making. The qualitative findings reveal constant efforts that focus on the Cognitive and Affective components of the destination image construction strategy (Kim & Yoon 2003). The diachronic interpretation of data also reveals that the historical events had indeed an impact on the destination image construction but only to a certain extent: themes of war heritage were strategically incorporated to construct a Cognitive Image component related to World War I memory, but the focus on the destination prevailed over fascist political propaganda during later years (1930s–1940s). The Affective strategy of highlighting the emotions that a destination would create in the visitors was maintained throughout the fascist period, effectively overriding the regime’s attempts to impose a rhetoric of national “mass tourism”.