Tourism as a specialised discourse: the case of normative guidelines in the European Union

Amongst the genres characterizing the language of tourism, some make it seems more immediately recognizable as specialized discourse. These are the genres of normative guidelines related to the tourism industry and issued by the European Union. Given the lack of analysis of these texts from the applied linguistics perspective, this preliminary investigation aims at describing some of the features of such normative guidelines, i.e., the high frequency of complex sentences, modality, technical terminology and ancient crystallized legal forms. Overall, these features seem an expression of statutory language which explicates the necessity to include all possible information in order to avoid ambiguity and vagueness, and to convey an impression of semantic objectivity and legal impartiality.