Persuasion in Tourism Discourse [1 ed.] 1443816817, 9781443816816

Citation preview

Persuasion in Tourism Discourse

Persuasion in Tourism Discourse: Methodologies and Models By

Elena Manca

Persuasion in Tourism Discourse: Methodologies and Models By Elena Manca This book first published 2016 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2016 by Elena Manca All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-1681-7 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-1681-6

~This book is dedicated~ ~to Alfredo, Piervito and Giacomo~

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ...................................................................................... x List of Figures ............................................................................................ xi List of Tables ............................................................................................ xiii Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Chapter One ................................................................................................. 5 Systemic Functional Linguistics, Visual Grammar and Tourist Promotion 1.1 Systemic Functional Grammar 1.1.1 The Ideational metafunction 1.1.2 The Interpersonal metafunction 1.1.3 The Textual metafunction 1.2 Visual Grammar 1.2.1 Representational meaning 1.2.2 Interactive meaning 1.2.3 Compositional meaning 1.3 The official tourist websites of Italy, Great Britain and Australia 1.4 Comparing results Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 64 The AIDA Model, Corpus Linguistics and Tourist Promotion 2.1 Corpus Linguistics and the analysis of language 2.2 Corpora and methods 2.3 Frequencies in the VisBrit corpus 2.3.1 Frequent nouns in the VisBrit 2.3.2 Frequent verbs in the VisBrit 2.3.3 Frequent adjectives in the VisBrit 2.4 Frequencies in the VisIt corpus 2.4.1 Frequent nouns in the VisIt 2.4.2 Frequent verbs in the VisIt 2.4.3 Frequent adjectives in the VisIt

viii

Table of Contents

2.5 Frequencies in the VisAus corpus 2.5.1 Frequent nouns in the VisAus 2.5.2 Frequent verbs in the VisAus 2.5.3 Frequent adjectives in the VisAus 2.6 Summary Chapter Three .......................................................................................... 104 Concordances, Cultural Dimensions and Tourist Promotion 3.1 Concordances in the VisBrit 3.1.1 ‘Park’ 3.1.2 ‘Home’ 3.1.3 ‘City’ 3.1.4 ‘Find’ 3.1.5 ‘See’ 3.1.6 ‘Take’ 3.1.7 ‘Great’ 3.1.8 ‘Top’ 3.1.9 ‘National’ 3.2 Concordances in the VisIt 3.2.1 Provincia (province) 3.2.2 Città (city/cities) 3.2.3 Territorio (territory) 3.2.4 Offre (3rd person singular - offers) 3.2.5 (Si) trova (is set) 3.2.6 Perdere (miss/lose) 3.2.7 Grande (great/big) 3.2.8 Storico (historic) 3.2.9 Tipici (typical/local) 3.3 Concordances in the VisAus 3.3.1 ‘Park’ 3.3.2 ‘Beach’ 3.3.3 ‘Island’ 3.3.4 ‘See’ 3.3.5 ‘Take’ 3.3.6 ‘Visit’ 3.3.7 ‘National’ 3.3.8 ‘Aboriginal’ 3.3.9 ‘Great’ 3.4 Comparing the three promotions

Persuasion in Tourism Discourse: Methodologies and Models

ix

3.5. Modal verbs in the three corpora 3.5.1 Modals in the VisBrit 3.5.2 Modals in the VisAus 3.5.3 Modals in the VisIt 3.6 Cultural dimensions, language and advertising 3.7. A cultural interpretation of results Chapter Four ............................................................................................ 142 Translation and Tourist Promotion across Languages and Cultures 4.1 Equivalence in the translation process 4.2 Comparing originals, translations and non-translated texts: translation universals 4.2.1 Identifying the features of the VisIt_T 4.2.2 Comparing the VisIt_T, the VisBrit and the VisIt 4.2.3 From non-translated texts (VisBrit) to translated texts (VisIt_T) 4.2.4 Comparing the VisBrit_T, the VisBrit and the VisIt 4.2.5 Comparing the VisAus_T, the VisAus and the VisIt 4.3 Conclusion Bibliography ............................................................................................ 175

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to thank all the people who have supported this work in various ways. In particular, I am deeply indebted to: Tourism Australia Images for allowing me to publish their images in Figures 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 1.10, 1.23 and 1.24; VisitBritain Images for allowing me to publish their images in Figures 1.8, 1.19, 1.20, 1.21 and 1.22; ENIT for their policy that permits citation, summary, extract or reproduction of part or individual sections of the Italian official tourist website for the purpose of discussion, critic, study and teaching, within the limits of these specific purposes and provided that this does not help to integrate the terms of a competition against ENIT with regard to their economic use. I would like to thank all the colleagues who gave their support, in particular Francesca Bianchi, Amanda Murphy, Cinzia Spinzi and Thomas Christiansen who provided extremely valuable feedback. I am particularly grateful to my friends and colleagues Gloria Cappelli, Olga Denti, Sabrina Francesconi and Stefania Maci for their constructive comments, support, and constant encouragement. On a more personal level, I would like to express my deepest thanks to my husband and children for their trust and love during these years. This book is obviously dedicated to them.

LIST OF FIGURES

1.1.Sydney (NSW), Bondi Beach – photographer Anson Smart – Tourism Australia 1.2.Tropical North Queensland (QLD), Kuranda Scenic railway, Stoney Creek Falls bridge – photographer Masaru Kitano snaK Productions – Tourism Australia 1.3.Aborigines (QLD) – photographer Oliver Strewe – Tourism Australia 1.4.Jacobs Creek Visitor Centre Garden, Barossa Valley, SA, Ultimate Winery Experiences of Australia – photographer Adrian Brown – Tourism Australia 1.5.Seal Bay, Kangaroo Island, SA – photographer Greg Snell – Tourism Australia 1.6.Venetian masques and costumes – www.italia.it– ENIT 1.7.Venetian gondolas – www.italia.it/ENIT 1.8.England, Near Blackpool Gate, Cumbria, Pony trekking at Bailey Mill Trekking Centre, Near Blackpool Gate, Cumbria, England – ©VisitBritain/Ben Barden 1.9.‘Made in Italy’ campaign - www.italy.travel– ENIT 1.10. Gold Coast, Queensland – photographer Jamie MacFadyen – Tourism Australia 1.11. A cavallo tra le colline della Sardegna (Riding among Sardinian hills) – www.italia.it– ENIT 1.12. ‘Made in Italy’ campaign – www.italy.travel– ENIT 1.13. Andria, Castel del Monte – www.italia.it– ENIT 1.14. ‘Made in Italy’ campaign – www.italy.travel– ENIT 1.15. ‘Made in Italy’ campaign – www.italy.travel– ENIT 1.16. Upper part of the homepage of www.italia.it– ENIT 1.17. Città d’Arte, Trieste, Friuli Venezia Giulia – www.italia.it– ENIT 1.18. Madonna di Campiglio – www.italia.it– ENIT 1.19. England, Liverpool, Merseyside: Maritime Albert Dock on Liverpool waterfront with the Three Graces historic buildings. The Liverpool world heritage site. Port of Liverpool building, the Cunard Building and the Liver building. A historic ship moored. Mist rising from the water – ©VisitBritain/Rod Edwards 1.20. Wales, Caernarfon, Gwynedd: Caernarvon castle is a historic site dominating the town of Caernarvon, overlooking the Menai straits. Afon Seiont. Dusk – ©VisitBritain/Lee Beel 1.21. England, Water Mouth Cove from Widmouth Head, Devon, England, UK – ©VisitBritain/ Adam Burton 1.22. England, Durdle Door, Dorset: Durdle Door is an eroded rock arch off the Jurassic Coast national park and coastal path in Dorset, and a national landmark. Britain 100 – ©VisitBritain/ Adam Burton

xii

List of Figures

1.23. Kangaroo, Esperance, WA – photographer Richard Powers – Tourism Australia 1.24. Great Barrier Reef, Queensland – photographer Darren Jew – Tourism Australia 2.1.Example of a wordlist generated by WordSmith 2.2.Five-word cluster of ‘city’ 2.3.Four-word cluster of ‘park’ 2.4.Four-word cluster of ‘great’ 2.5.Four-word cluster of ‘see’ 2.6.Four-word cluster of città 2.7.Four-word cluster of mare 2.8.Four-word cluster of grande 2.9.Four-word cluster of offre

LIST OF TABLES

1.1. 1.2. 1.3. 1.4. 1.5. 1.6. 1.7. 2.1. 2.2. 2.3. 2.4. 2.5. 2.6. 2.7. 2.8. 2.9. 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5

The Ideational metafunction and its systems The Interpersonal metafunction and its systems The Textual metafunction and its systems Representational meaning Interactive meaning Compositional meaning Summary of the results of the three analyses List of the first 40 content words in the VisBrit Semantic fields of nouns and their frequency in the VisBrit Semantic fields of adjectives and their frequency in the VisBrit List of the first 40 content words in the VisIt Semantic fields of nouns in the VisBrit and in the VisIt Semantic fields of adjectives and their frequency in the VisIt List of the first 40 content words in the VisAus Semantic fields of nouns and their frequency in the VisAus Semantic fields of adjectives and their frequency in the VisAus The three most frequent nouns, verbs and adjectives in the VisBrit The three most frequent nouns, verbs and adjectives in the VisIt The three most frequent nouns, verbs and adjectives in the VisAus Modals in the VisBrit Modals in the VisAus

4.1. 4.2. 4.3. 4.4. 4.5. 4.6. 4.7. 4.8. 4.9.

STTRs of the VisIt_T, VisBrit, VisAus, and VisIt First 20 content words of the VisIt, VisIt_T and VisBrit Adjectives in the VisIt, VisIt_T, and VisBrit STTRs of the VisBrit_T, VisBrit, and VisIt First 20 content words in the VisIt, VisBrit_T and VisBrit Words with mismatch in frequency in the VisIt, VisBrit_T and VisBrit STTRs of the VisAus_T, VisIt and VisAus First 20 content words in the VisIt, VisAus_T and VisAus Words with mismatch in frequency in the VisIt, VisAus_T and VisAus

INTRODUCTION

Tourism has been defined by the UNWTO (2014) as “a social, cultural and economic phenomenon which entails the movement of people to countries or places outside their usual environment for personal or business/professional purposes”. The question is: if tourism is just a movement of people mainly for recreational or professional aims, why are so many scholars interested in tourism studies? An answer comes from Thurlow and Jaworski (2011, p. 287) who, following Favero (2007), suggest that tourism has a powerful role in reshaping cultural practices, establishing ideologies of difference, and perpetuating unequal relationships of power. In short, tourism produces the very culture that tourists set out to know (ibid.). Along the same lines, Denti (2012, p. 11) considers tourism as cultural in itself, a cross-cultural dialogic process whose participants are both the travellers/tourists who explore new territories eager to encounter and discover new worlds, new languages and new discourses, and the promoters of tourist destinations who accompany them throughout their discovery by revealing distinct aspects and patterns of their cultural identity. Tourism is, therefore, more than just a leisure or professional activity; it can be considered the representation and the discovery of the cultural identity of a country. The words which are selected to promote a tourist destination as well as the accompanying images and the way these two modes of communication are organized in a website, brochure or guidebook inevitably reflect more than just a promotional aim. They mainly represent those social and cultural choices which are characteristic of each country and of each culture and which are, for this reason, more than worth investigating. Advertising texts, such as tourist texts, are an example of how alterity (represented by the destinations promoted) is pre-systematised by the tourism industry and, within this frame, of how pre-packaged representations are turned into objects of tourist consumption (Francesconi 2007, p. 6). The way tourists perceive and encode this alterity is determined by their perception of and by their approach to the space visited, thus tourist behaviour relies on a social, relational network of beliefs and acts (ibid.). The advertising process in tourism could be synthesised as a circular process involving cultural encounters: the promotion of a destination is the reflection of the socio-cultural features of

2

Introduction

the context which has produced a tourist product; at the same time the message of the promotion is culturally filtered through the perception of tourists/travellers, who belong to different socio-cultural contexts. For this reason, identifying the features of tourism promotion for each country means classifying those pre-systematised representations (both linguistic and socio-cultural) which are particular to given socio-cultural contexts and which the tourism industry has selected to persuade potential tourists to choose the product advertised. At the same time, a classification of the features of the tourist promotion of a country/culture will help develop other tourist products which aim to target the members of that culture. This volume contributes to the field of tourism studies by focusing on the concept of persuasion and on how persuasion is activated in tourism communication by different countries/cultures. In particular, the aim of the different analyses described in this volume is to understand what the many modes of communication used in tourism discourse tell us about Italy, Great Britain and Australia from a linguistic and socio-cultural perspective. Tourism discourse is highly persuasive because its ultimate purpose is to sell a product by describing a reality which has to be perceived by potential tourists as authentic and which can give them the illusion of really living an ‘off-the-beaten-track’ holiday experience (Maci 2013, p. 21). In order to do this, texts are characterised by a network of interrelations in which both verbal and iconic elements are combined to meet the tourist’s expectation (ibid.). For this reason, the analyses described in this volume take into account both the visual and the linguistic features of three official promotional websites, that is to say of Italy (www.italia.it), of Great Britain (www.visitbritain.co.uk), and of Australia (www.australia.com). The identification of the promotional strategies adopted by the three websites will be carried out by applying several methodologies and models: Halliday’s systemic functional grammar; Kress and van Leeuwen’s visual grammar; the AIDA model; the Corpus Linguistics approach; Hall and Hofstede’s models; and the theories on the universals of translation. The combination of all these methodologies and models has been revealed to be particularly insightful because the results of the several analyses conducted have allowed us to thoroughly understand and to scientifically define the strict relationship between identity/culture and communication in tourism discourse.

Persuasion in Tourism Discourse: Methodologies and Models

3

Volume structure outline Chapter one will describe how, following Halliday’s systemic functional grammar and Kress and van Leeuwen’s visual grammar (2001; 2006), the strategies adopted in tourist websites to communicate meanings and to influence tourists’ behaviours, at a pre-trip stage, can be identified and analysed. The starting assumption is that a text, or, in this case, a website, is not only language but also a set of culturally and functionally dependent modes which all contribute to the overall meaning and make the text function as a full system of communication. Implications for this analysis will be several: the assumption is that language, images and culture are strictly interrelated; accordingly, every act of cross-cultural communication (from the translation of a tourist product to the development of promotional tourist products for international audiences) should not disregard this aspect and thus should carefully select the strategies to be adopted for a successful result. Chapter two will adopt the methodology of Corpus Linguistics to explore linguistic patterns and regularities in tourist promotion and discuss how language is used in the creation of persuasive texts. The analysis proposed in this chapter will aim at identifying, describing, and comparing the promotional language used by the Italian, the British and the Australian cultures in order to advertise and promote their respective countries as holiday destinations. Thus, an analysis of frequencies will be carried out starting with the wordlists of the three corpora, the content words contained in the wordlists and the semantic categories which occur more frequently in each corpus. Results will be interpreted according to the four steps of the AIDA model in order to describe how persuasion is linguistically activated in the three websites and what kind of concepts and descriptions are preferred and are more relevant in the promotion of the three countries. Chapter three will consider some frequent words in the three corpora in order to investigate how they are used in the three different contexts. In order to compare and contrast the language used in the three types of promotion, nine words in each corpus will be analysed, namely the three most frequent nouns, the three most frequent verbs, and the three most frequent adjectives. Furthermore, a concordance analysis of modality and of how modality is strategically used for promotional aims will be carried out in the three corpora.

4

Introduction

Results will be contrasted and compared from two perspectives: the linguistic one, which will focus on usage and on what is un/typical of a language; and the cultural one, which will try to interpret data against the framework provided by Intercultural studies and theories. Chapter four will consider the Italian translations available on the British website www.visitbritain.co.uk and on the Australian website www.australia.com and the English version provided by the Italian website www.italia.it. Translated, original and non-translated texts will be analysed and compared in order to identify what kind of equivalence has been preferred in the translated versions and whether the strategies of promotion used by translators have re-shaped the final product taking into account the features of the receiving language and culture.

CHAPTER ONE SYSTEMIC FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTICS, VISUAL GRAMMAR AND TOURIST PROMOTION

The aim of this chapter is to describe how, following Halliday’s systemic functional grammar and Kress and van Leeuwen’s visual grammar (2001; 2006), the strategies adopted in tourist websites to communicate meanings and to influence tourists’ behaviours, at a pre-trip stage, can be identified and analysed. The starting assumption is that a text, or, in this case, a website, is not only language but also a set of culturally and functionally dependent modes which all contribute to the overall meaning and make the text function as a full system of communication. Modes are defined by Halliday (1985a, p. 4) as a set of systems of meanings which include language but also artistic expressions such as painting, sculpture, music, dance and other forms, that is to say ‘forms of exchange’. The study of meaning is, therefore, the study of this set of interrelating modes. In his systemic functional linguistics, Halliday (1978; 1994) focuses on the language mode, which is defined as a social semiotic system, an act of communication which involves choices on the paradigmatic axis and whose structure and organisation is influenced by the functions that the language system has to serve. Language has three metafunctions, which come into being simultaneously and have equal status: language tells something about reality via the ideational metafunction, about the social relationships among the language users in communicative events via the interpersonal metafunction, and is organized as a piece of writing or speech via the textual metafunction (Halliday 1978; 1985a; 1994). A role of utmost importance in understanding how language is used in communicative events, is played by the social context. The strong and systematic relationship existing between language and the social environment is demonstrated by the three register variables of Field, Tenor and Mode (Halliday 1985a, p. 12):

6

Chapter One

x Field refers to the topic of the communicative events and to the nature of the social action, and is closely connected with the Ideational metafunction; x Tenor refers to the participants, their statuses and roles, their permanent and temporary relationships, and combines with the Interpersonal metafunction; x Mode refers to the role language plays, the symbolic organisation of the text, its status, its function in the context, the channel and the rhetorical mode, and is linked to the Textual metafunction. This metafunctional framework has been adopted and extended by Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) and applied to a wide range of semiotic systems (or modes) including pictures, music and sounds. The theory of communication, which derives from this application, is defined multimodality. Multimodality focuses on the process in which people make choices by selecting one modal resource (meaning potential) over another (Bezemer and Jewitt, 2010) and explores how meanings are achieved in all modes. What Halliday and Kress and van Leeuwen have in common is the definition of meaning as a result of a number of interrelated choices made by people in communicative events. The approach to multimodality, which will be discussed in this chapter, is the social semiotic approach developed by Kress and van Leeuwen (2001; 2006). This approach is not limited to the interpretation of language and its meanings but is extended to the whole range of modes of representation employed in a culture. In this view of multimodality, common semiotic principles operate in and across different modes, which in the age of digitisation have technically become the same at some level of representation (Kress and van Leeuwen 2001, p. 4). This approach has at its basis three important theoretical assumptions (Bezemer and Jewitt 2010, p. 183-184): 1. it assumes that representation and communication draw on a multiplicity of modes which all contribute to meaning; 2. it assumes that all forms of communication (modes) have, like language, been shaped through their cultural, historical and social uses to express social functions; 3. third, the meanings brought about by any mode are always interwoven with the meanings made with those other modes copresent and co-operating in the communicative event, and this interaction produces meaning.

Systemic Functional Linguistics, Visual Grammar and Tourist Promotion

7

Multimodal texts can be divided into space-based texts, time-based texts or a combination of the two (Francesconi 2014, p. 131). Space-based texts include static texts such as writing, pictures, postcards and guides, which all convey meanings through the simultaneous co-deployment of visual and verbal items. Time-based texts include dynamic texts, such as speech, dance, commercials and films which are all characterised by the unfolding in time of various integrated semiotic resources. Hypertexts are in between, in that they combine properties of both static and dynamic texts. Tourism discourse is a domain where the combination of both verbal and visual communication evidently contributes to the achievement of the final aim: language, images and sounds are strategically combined together to inform, attract and persuade the potential tourist at the pre-trip stage. This chapter presents a brief overview of the three metafunctions of systemic functional grammar and an overview of visual grammar and applies both these frameworks to: 1. the analysis of the homepages of three official websites for the tourist promotion of Italy, Great Britain and Australia, and 2. the analysis of the webpages where the cities of Naples, Belfast and Melbourne are described. Results from these analyses will be contrasted and compared in order to identify similarities and differences in terms of strategies adopted to attract inbound tourism.

1.1 Systemic Functional Grammar As anticipated above, the clauses in a text simultaneously contain ideational, interpersonal and textual meanings. This section provides a brief overview of how the clause is able to represent reality and to describe the relationships between participants, and how these meanings are structured into a message. The grammar systems and the functional constituents of the clause that determine each metafunction will be described and exemplified. The contents developed in the following section are taken from Halliday (1978; 1985b), Halliday and Mathiessen (2004) and Eggins (2011). The clauses and phrases reported as examples of the systems through which the three metafunctions are configured and of the functional constituents are taken from the three websites which will be the object of detailed analysis in section 1.3.

Chapter One

8

1.1.1 The Ideational metafunction According to Halliday (2004, p. 29) language construes human experience. The function which is concerned with the way external reality, that is to say the outside world, is represented in a text is defined as the Ideational metafunction and is comprised of two components: the Experiential metafunction and the Logical metafunction (Table 1.1). The Ideational metafunction corresponds to the variable of Field of the context of situation and it is expressed in the grammar system through Transitivity, Taxis and Logico-semantic relations. TABLE 1.1. The Ideational metafunction and its systems

Experential metafunction Ideational metafunction

Transitivity Taxis

Logical metafunction Logico-semantic relations

The Experiential meaning is expressed through the system of Transitivity, which refers to the grammatical representation of relationships between participants, processes and circumstances in a clause. In fact, the clause is not just a giving of information, it is a giving of information about something (Eggins 2011, p. 211). In order to capture Experiential meanings, a clause needs to be described according to a set of labels applied to clause constituents in accordance with their content roles: labels change according to the type of action being described but they always refer to a ‘doer’, a ‘process’ and a ‘thing’ affected by the action. When the system of Transitivity in a clause is analysed, three main aspects of a clause are described (Eggins 2011, p. 214): 1. the selection of a ‘process’, realised in the verbal group; 2. the selection of ‘participants’, realised in the nominal group; 3. the selection of ‘circumstances’, expressed through adverbial

groups or prepositional phrases. Processes, which are realised in the verbal group, can be of different types. Depending on what they describe they can be: Material, Mental, Verbal, Behavioural, Existential, and Relational (Halliday, 2004).

Systemic Functional Linguistics, Visual Grammar and Tourist Promotion

9

A clause describing processes of doing, concrete actions, is said to describe Material processes. In such clauses, clause constituents are Actor (the doer of the action), Process (the performing of an action), Beneficiary (the participant that benefits from the process), Goal (the participant at whom the process is directed), and Circumstance (where, when, how, and why processes occur), as in the example below: Oxford to Avebury Actor

offers

you

Process

Beneficiary

everything quintessentially English Goal

In this case, Oxford to Avebury is the Actor, you is the Beneficiary, and everything quintessentially English is the Goal. Conversely, processes which encode meanings of thinking or feeling are defined as Mental processes. All Mental processes have two participants, which are labelled the Senser (the participant who perceives, thinks and feels) and the Phenomenon (what is perceived, thought and felt). Do

you Senser

want Mental Process

a great family day out? Phenomenon

The third process type is defined as Behavioural: it refers to a type of action which has to be experienced by a conscious being. The majority of Behaviourals have only one participant, the Behaver and the participant at whom the process is directed is the Phenomenon. You Behaver

will listen Behavioural Process

to the call of the upland birds Phenomenon

Verbal processes are processes of verbal actions such as ‘say’ and all its synonyms. This process typically contains three participants, namely Sayer, Receiver and Verbiage, that is to say, the one responsible for the verbal process (Sayer), the participant to whom the verbal process is directed (Receiver), and the nominalized statement of the verbal process (Verbiage). The machine

will tell

you

Sayer

Verbal Process

Receiver

cost-perminute Verbiage

for parking Circumst.: Cause

Chapter One

10

Another group of processes differ from those described above in that they do not describe actions but rather states of being. These processes are: 1. Existential processes, when things are simply stated to exist; 2. Relational processes when things are stated to exist in relation to other things. The only obligatory participant of an Existential process is labelled the Existent. There

are Existential Process

thousands of bicycle hire companies Existent

all over Britain Circumst.: Location

Relational processes require two participants and are connected with being, possessing and becoming. These processes can be of two sub-types: Attributive and Identifying processes. The general structure of an Attributive process is, for example, A is an attribute of B, whereas the general structure of an Identifying process is A is the identity of B. In the Attributive process, a classification or descriptive epithet (Attribute) is assigned to a participant (Carrier). London

is

Carrier

Pr.: Attributive

a vibrant, multicultural, 24-hour city Attribute

In the Identifying processes, the action does not correspond to classifying but rather to defining, to the establishment of an identity. A Token is defined by a Value. Tourism

represents

Token

Pr.: Identifying

a large sector of Australian economy Value

In some of the examples quoted above, some elements of the clause, particularly in final position, have been labelled Circumstances. Circumstances are another type of participant in the clause. They may occur with all process types. Circumstances describe where, when, how, and why processes occur. Actions are performed by participants in certain circumstances: with a certain duration (Extent) or in a definite time and

Systemic Functional Linguistics, Visual Grammar and Tourist Promotion 11

place (Location), in a given way (Manner), for a certain cause (Cause), with other participants (Accompaniment), performing a certain role (Role). For example: You can ride all day. (Extent) Cambridge offers some of the best shopping in the region. (Location) You can travel all over Scotland by train. (Manner) You can now stay in it thanks to the Landmark Trust. (Cause) I visited London with some friends. (Accompaniment) She is going to London as a tourist. (Role)

Francesconi (2014, p. 46) suggests that, in tourism and travel texts, the system of Transitivity usually resorts to Material processes expressing movement, Mental processes indicating sensorial perception, and Circumstances of spatial extent and location. An important role is also performed by the processes of Attribution and Identification, which are associated with circumstances of manner and role. As mentioned above and visually exemplified in Table 1, the second component of the Ideational meaning is the Logical meaning, which is the logical structure of the clause complex. Language users have available a number of structural resources which allow them to create logical connections between experiential events. These structures are systems such as the Tactic system, including parataxis and hypotaxis, and the Logico-semantic system, which includes projection (when a clause is quoted or reported by another clause) and expansion (when one clause extends on the meanings of another). In the Tactic system, adjacent clauses can be independent or dependent: when the pieces of information constituting the clause have equal weight, the relation is defined as parataxis; conversely, when one clause is structurally dependent on another, the relation is defined as hypotaxis. In the following examples, the first clause shows two pieces of information linked by a relation of parataxis (by means of the conjunction ‘and’) while the second presents a hypotactic structure (where the subordinated clause is introduced by ‘when’): Ride a splendid Victorian or Edwardian locomotive and get a unique insight into British transport history.

12

Chapter One When the sun sets on London the city comes alive.

Logico-semantic relations describe the semantic relations in the process of joining clauses together and can be grouped under Projection, that is to say when a clause is ‘projected’ through a verb of saying or thinking, and under Expansion when a nuclear situation is expanded by means of other situations (Downing and Locke 2002, p. 279). The system of Expansion allows us to develop the experiential meaning in three main ways: through the elaboration, extension or enhancement of its meanings. The following clauses exemplify the different types of relations: Samuel Johnson said, “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life”. (Projection) Some cookers may use both gas and electricity, for example they may use gas for the hob and electricity for the oven. (Expansion through Elaboration) But instead of disappearing from the restaurant scene entirely, Marco became a restaurateur, and now has a number of enterprises all over Britain. (Expansion through Extension) Wherever you are in the country, you'll find a diverse and exciting range of shops. (Expansion through Enhancement)

Having seen how reality can be described in a clause, the following section proceeds with the description of the Interpersonal metafunction and the systems through which participants’ relationships are expressed in a clause.

1.1.2 The Interpersonal metafunction The sentence is not only a representation of reality but it is also a piece of interaction between speaker and listener (Halliday 1985b, p. 20). For this reason, Halliday elaborates on the Interpersonal metafunction (Table 1.2), according to which language is not seen as a way of reflecting reality but as a way of acting. This function relates to the Tenor of discourse and is expressed through the systems of Mood and Modality

Systemic Functional Linguistics, Visual Grammar and Tourist Promotion 13 TABLE 1.2. The Interpersonal metafunction and its systems MOOD Mood Residue Interpersonal metafunction

Modalisation Modality Modulation

The system of Mood will be explained first. According to the Interpersonal metafunction, clauses can be divided into two functional constituents: the MOOD element which carries the argument and the RESIDUE, which is the remaining part of the clause. The MOOD can be comprised of: 1. a nominal-type element, the Subject; 2. a verbal type element, the Finite. The Subject contains the element that is responsible for the functioning of the clause as an interactive event. The Finite has the function of making the proposition finite, by relating it to its context in the speech event (Halliday 2004, p. 115). This is achieved in two ways: 1. by reference to the time of speaking, in grammatical terms, the primary tense; 2. by reference to the judgement of the speaker, in grammatical terms, modality. While primary tense refers to past, present or future at the moment of speaking, modality refers to the likeliness or unlikeliness of what is being said. What they both have in common is interpersonal deixis: the primary tense construes time interpersonally, which is defined by what is present to you and me, and modality construes an area which includes different degrees of certainty/uncertainty where interlocutors can express or ask to express an assessment of validity of what is being said (ibid., p. 116). Finiteness is, therefore, expressed by means of a verbal operator that is either temporal or modal (ibid.). A clause also expresses Polarity, that is to say the choice between positive or negative. Polarity together with Finite and Subject are the elements constituting the MOOD (or Mood block). The Residue, the remaining functional constituent of the clause, consists of three types of functional elements: Predicator, Complement and Adjunct. The Predicator is the lexical or content part of the verbal group, as exemplified below:

Chapter One

14 You Subject

will

find

Finite MOOD

this and more in Scotland

Predicator RESIDUE

There are also clauses where there is only one verbal constituent: in that case Finite and Predicator are fused together. In the example below, ‘boasts’ performs a dual function: it specifies the time (Finite: Present) and indicates the nature of the event (Predicator). Scotland Subject

boasts Finite MOOD

vibrant and exciting cities

Predicator RESIDUE

It is also possible that a clause contains a verb but not a Finite and in that case the clause is defined non-finite. An example is the Imperative mood of the following clause, where only the Residue is present: Subject

Discover Predicator

Finite MOOD

London RESIDUE

A Complement is a non-essential participant in the clause and corresponds to the Complement and Object of traditional grammar. The Complement has the potential for being a Subject but only if the clause is made passive. It is typically carried out by a nominal group. Britain Subject

has

produced

Finite MOOD

Predicator

some of the world’s greatest writers Complement RESIDUE

There is a sub-class of Complements which are called Attributive Complements when the Complement is an adjectival element. Cardiff Subject

is Finite MOOD

lively Attributive Complement RESIDUE

Adjuncts are clause complements which contribute some additional (although not essential) information to the clause. Adjuncts may be

Systemic Functional Linguistics, Visual Grammar and Tourist Promotion 15

Circumstantial (adding experiential meaning), Textual (adding textual meaning such as conjunctive and continuity adjuncts), and Modal which add interpersonal meaning to the clause, that is to say they contribute to the creation and maintenance of the dialogue. There are four main types of Modal Adjunct: Mood Adjuncts, Polarity Adjuncts, Comment Adjuncts, and Vocative Adjuncts. Mood Adjuncts express probability (perhaps, probably), usuality (sometimes, usually), intensification or minimization (really, absolutely, just), presumption (evidently, obviously), and inclination (happily, willingly). Polarity Adjuncts are expressed by Yes and No and their conversational alternatives. Comment Adjuncts function by expressing an assessment about the clause as a whole and are realised by adverbs. For example, the adverb incredibly in the following clause is a Comment Adjunct: Recent archaeological excavations of Dunluce Castle have further demonstrated the significance of the site, revealing an incredibly well preserved merchant town built in 1608.

Vocative Adjuncts are identifiable as names which do not function as Subjects or Complements, and usually occur either initially or finally. The Interpersonal meaning is also configured through the system of Modality (Halliday 2004, p. 147; Eggins 2011, p. 172). When Modality is used to argue about the probability or frequency of propositions, it is defined as Modalisation. When Modality is used to argue about the obligation or inclination of proposals, it is referred to as Modulation. Modalisation describes the implicit judgement of the speaker and can be expressed by finite modal operators, Mood Adjuncts, or by both together, as exemplified below: Finite modal operator may: You may also want to look at the sitemap to see our full range of categories in which we offer products.

Mood Adjunct possibly: Attached to possibly the oldest independent brewery in the country, The Three Tuns Inn serves excellent ale.

16

Chapter One

Finite Modal operator + Mood Adjunct: Everything you might possibly want to buy is available here.

Both modal operators and Mood Adjuncts may express different degrees of certainty or usuality. For example, must, certainly, and always express high certainty; may, probably, and usually express median certainty; might, possibly, sometimes express low certainty. Modalisation can also be more explicitly expressed through a particular type of Mood Adjuncts, which are examples of what Halliday (2004, p. 626-630) defines as grammatical metaphor. These Mood Adjuncts perform as a clause and are, for example, I reckon, I guess, I think, I suppose, I’m sure. Modalisation can also express frequency, as exemplified in the sentences below with the adverbs regularly, frequently, and rarely: The sightseeing boats run regularly between Westminster - London Eye Tower of London - Greenwich. Conquer the Tower. Windsor Castle is an official residence of the Queen and frequently visited by William and Kate. Much like the Brits themselves, UK culture is always diverse, often eccentric, frequently humorous and rarely boring!

As already mentioned above, when Modality is used to talk about obligation or inclination, it is referred to as Modulation. The following are examples of Modulation whose aim is to get people to behave in a particular way. They describe a command: You can book a minicab a day in advance, or as and when you need it. You should be aware that retailers can charge more for goods and services bought by credit card. You must ensure that you place your order before noon on the day before …

Conversely, the examples of Modulation reported below refer to an offer and express inclination, that is to say ‘How willing I am to do something for you’:

Systemic Functional Linguistics, Visual Grammar and Tourist Promotion 17 We are happy to refund returned goods which are covered within our terms and conditions … Blas is the Gaelic word for taste or flavour, and that’s exactly what we want to give you …

As Halliday points out (2004, p. 106-111; Eggins 2001, p. 144-145), when language is used to interact, its aim is establishing a relationship among the participants to the communicative act. This relationship is established through an alternation of the two basic speech roles of giving and demanding. What can be given and demanded in the exchange (that is to say the ‘commodity’) is either information or goods and services. Speech role and commodity are realised through the four basic move types, which are defined by Halliday as ‘speech functions’: statement, question, offer and command. These speech functions will be considered in detail in the analysis reported in section 1.3.

1.1.3 The Textual metafunction The Textual metafunction corresponds to the variable of Mode, it gives the clause its character as a message and organizes the clause in order to create relevance to the context and to achieve different purposes. In English, the textual meaning is expressed through the ordering of constituents and it is configured through the systems of Theme and Information Structure (Table 1.3). TABLE 1.3. The Textual metafunction and its systems Theme

Theme Rheme

Information structure

Given New

Textual metafunction

The system of Theme sees the clause as consisting of two elements: the Theme and the Rheme. The Theme is the element which serves as the point of departure from the message. The Theme is then developed in the second part of the message, which is called the Rheme. The Theme is always put first and is followed by the Rheme. According to Halliday (2004, p. 66) the Theme of a clause is the first group or phrase that has some function in the experiential structure of the clause.

18

Chapter One

The most common type of Theme is typified by a nominal group but it may also be an adverbial group, a prepositional phrase or a nominal group not functioning as Subject. Here are some examples. Themes are those parts of the clause which are not in italics: From March to November you can see the beautiful tiled floors, intricate stained glass windows and fascinating Victorian features for yourself on a guided tour. Britain is packed with historic monuments, royal palaces and some of the world's top museums. At the monthly Big Saturday events, kids can discover everything from fossils and ancient cultures to the latest scientific breakthroughs. For a day out that’s guaranteed to keep everyone from toddlers to teens happy …

Themes can be unmarked or marked. Putting a subject in thematic position means making an unmarked choice, that is to say a choice which is very likely to be made in declarative clauses. Conversely, a marked Theme in a declarative clause is a Theme which is not combined with the subject but with any other elements that constitute the clause. Halliday (1985b, p. 45) indicates that the adjuncts are the most usual form of marked Theme in declarative clauses, such as today, suddenly, at night, without much hope whereas the most marked type of Theme in declarative clauses is a complement. In the examples reported above, the only unmarked Theme is Britain. All the other Themes are marked. In interrogative clauses, verbs, auxiliaries, and Wh- elements are unmarked thematic choices. Their occurrence in first position is the regular pattern by which the interrogative is expressed. Marked Themes are not usually used in interrogative clauses. However, examples of marked Theme in this type of clause are (Halliday 1985b, p. 48): after tea will you tell me a story? where the Theme is after tea and in your house who does the cooking where in your house represents the Theme. In Imperative clauses, the unmarked Theme is represented by you, let’s and the verb. In negative Imperatives, a typical Theme is don’t. The unmarked Theme is, therefore, a Theme which conflates with the Mood structure constituents that typically occur in first position in clauses of that Mood class (Eggins 2011, p. 318). Other types of marked Themes are Predicated Themes and Identifying Themes, exemplified below:

Systemic Functional Linguistics, Visual Grammar and Tourist Promotion 19 It is in the 19th century that it became popular … (Predicated Theme) What traditional British holiday villages have to offer is fun and entertainment for everyone. (Identifying Theme)

Predicated and Identifying Themes allow the speakers to structure the message in whatever way they want, that is to say overcoming restrictions on word order (see Baker 1992, p. 136). Furthermore, they imply contrast and contribute to the meaning of exclusiveness. As explained by Halliday (1985b, p. 49-52; see also Baker 1992, p. 123), conjunctions and modal adjuncts (such as and, or, when, even if, …; and probably, perhaps, usually, broadly speaking, …) usually occur at the beginning of a clause in English. This means that these items can be considered inherently thematic and it is natural for the speaker to put them in initial position. These elements are, therefore, not considered part of the thematic structure. The other system through which the Textual metafunction is configured is the Information structure. This structure is made up of two constituents, the Given and the New. The Given is that part of the information unit which is already known to the hearer or to the reader; the New is the remaining part of the unit which presents the new message. Given and Theme and New and Rheme are semantically related but not equal. The Theme is the point of departure of a speaker or of a writer while the Given represents the common ground between the speaker/writer and the listener/reader. Similarly, the Rheme is what the speaker/writer says about the Theme and New is what is not already known to the listener/reader. This explains why Theme and Rheme are speaker oriented while Given and New are listener oriented. What is new and what is given, therefore, depends on the common ground, on the shared knowledge existing between the interlocutors. The three metafunctions together with the systems through which they are expressed will constitute the framework applied to the analysis of the three homepages, the object of our study, and to the linguistic descriptions of the cities of Naples, Belfast and Melbourne. This analysis will help identify the features of the Italian, British and Australian tourist promotions and the strategies adopted to create interactivity with the potential tourists consulting the webpages. In the following section, attention will be given to Visual grammar and to the way the three metafunctions have been elaborated on and adapted by Kress and van Leeuwen in their framework of interpretation of images.

20

Chapter One

1.2 Visual Grammar The three metafunctions amplified by Halliday and described in the preceding section have a decisive influence on Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (2006) social semiotic framework of visual communication grammar. The basic assumption of this model is that the three communicative metafunctions can be fulfilled by several modes, such as image, colour, music, typography and so on. The key notion in any semiotics is the ‘sign’, or ‘sign making’, therefore Kress and Van Leeuwen (ibid.) discuss forms (signifier) such as vector, modality, gaze, composition, perspective, line and colour, as well as the way in which these forms are used to produce meanings (signified) in the making of signs. Kress and van Leeuwen (ibid.) adopt a different terminology in their analysis of visual communication to refer to the meanings portrayed in images: the ideational metafunction corresponds to what they call representational meaning, the interpersonal metafunction to interactive meaning, and the textual metafunction corresponds to compositional meaning.

1.2.1 Representational meaning At the basis of the representational meaning (ideational metafunction) there is the assumption that “any semiotic mode has to be able to represent aspects of the world as it is experienced by humans” (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006, p. 42). The objects or elements represented are called participants. In every semiotic act there can be two types of participants involved: ‘interactive participants’ and ‘represented participants’. The former are the participants in the act of communication and the latter are the participants who constitute the subject matter of the communication. Two kinds of images have been identified by Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) with reference to the representational meaning (Table 1.4): 1. narrative images which involve four processes, namely action process, reactional process, speech and mental process, and conversion process, 2. conceptual images which include classificational process, analytical process and symbolic process (Liu 2013, p. 2160). Narrative images connect participants in terms of ‘doings’ and ‘happenings’, of the unfolding of actions, events, or processes of change while conceptual images represent participants in terms of their more generalized, stable or ‘timeless’ essences (van Leeuwen and Jewitt 2001, p. 141). In visual grammar, verbs of action are rendered by “elements that can be formally defined as vectors” (Kress & van Leeuwen 2006, p. 46).

Systemic Functional Linguistics, Visual Grammar and Tourist Promotion 21

Vectors have the function of connecting participants and representing them as doing something to or for each other (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006, p. 59). TABLE 1.4. Representational meaning Action process Reactional process

Transactional Nontransactional

Narrative images Speech/Mental process Conversion process Representational meaning

Covert taxonomy Classificational process Overt taxonomy Conceptual images

Analytical process Symbolic Attributive Symbolic process Symbolic Suggestive

In Action processes, the Actor is the participant from which the vector emanates or which forms the vector (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006, p. 63). That is, in order to be considered an Action Process, the Actor must either have a vector coming out of it or actually form the vector. Action processes can be of two types: transactional or non-transactional. When represented participants take on the role of Actor and Goal connected by a vector which emanates from the Actor or is represented by the Actor itself, the action process is transactional. Conversely, when there is no Goal in an image and vectors are not done to or aimed at anyone or anything and leave the viewer to imagine who or what he or she may be communicating with, the action is defined non-transactional (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006, p. 63). Structures are also non-transactional when they include only the Goal: this type of representation is called Events. In Events, something

22

Chapter One

is happening to a Goal but we do not know who is making this happen or we may see only a part of the Actor (a foot, a hand, ...) who, in this way, remains anonymous. An example of Event is visible in Figure 1.3.

FIGURE 1.1

FIGURE 1.2

In pictures, vectors may be depicted as elements which form an oblique line, or may be formed by bodies, limbs, tools or a road running diagonally across the picture space. Examples are Figure 1.1 and Figure 1.2. The presence of vectors in Figure 1.1 and Figure 1.2, make the structure of the visual representation of the narrative type. Vectorial patterns are narrative, when they present unfolding actions and events, processes of change, transitory spatial arrangements. In Figure 1.1, the

Systemic Functional Linguistics, Visual Grammar and Tourist Promotion 23

couple is moving to the viewer’s left, and the vectors are represented by their arms, legs, and gazes. In Figure 1.2, the viewer’s eyes follow the vector created by the railway and the train running diagonally across the picture space.

FIGURE 1.3

FIGURE 1.4

Narrative processes are defined as Reactional when the vector is formed solely by an eyeline or by the direction of the glance. In this case the participants, from which the vector emanates, are called Reacters and the participants at which or whom the vector is directed are called Phenomena.

24

Chapter One

In Figure 1.4, participants are represented by the two men and the three women (the Reacters) and by the kitchen tools and food which are being used (the Phenomena). Vectors are represented by the women’s and men’s glances at the tools and food, and represent the relationship between the Reacters and the Phenomena of the picture. Similarly to Action processes, Reactions can be transactional or nontransactional. In the example of Figure 1.4, the Reaction is transactional in that a Phenomenon is clearly visible. In other cases, the Phenomenon is not present and it is left to the viewer to imagine what the Reacter is looking at. This creates a powerful sense of empathy or identification with the represented participant (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006, p. 68). Narrative images may also contain secondary participants, named Circumstances, which are not related to the main participants by means of vectors but in other ways. Locative Circumstances relate participants to a specific participant called Setting. This relationship implies a contrast between foreground and background which can be depicted in three ways (ibid., p. 72): 1. The participants in the foreground overlap and partially obscure the Setting; 2. the Setting has a softer focus; 3. the Setting has colours all tending towards the same hue; 4. the Setting is darker or lighter than the foreground. Circumstances of Means refer to the tools used in the processes. They may be identified with the vectors which perform the actions. The knife in Figure 1.4 and the brush in Figure 1.3 can be defined Circumstances of Means. Circumstances of Accompaniment occur when two participants are not related by means of a vector but when they are simply together, one with the other. As described above, Conceptual images are the second type of image which depict the Representational meaning. These representations do not have vectors and are the visual representation of a static and timeless concept rather than an unfolding of actions. In conceptual images participants are represented in terms of their class, structure or meaning. Figure 1.5 is an example of Conceptual structure where the participants are represented in terms of their belonging to a class, in this case Australian wildlife.

Systemic Functional Linguistics, Visual Grammar and Tourist Promotion 25

FIGURE 1.5

Conceptual images may be categorized into Classificational, Analytical, or Symbolic processes. Classificational processes relate participants to each other in a way that is often without context and is as objective as possible: in these representations some participants play the role of Subordinates to at least one other participant, the Superordinate, or all the participants may be portrayed in a symmetrical equivalence (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2006, p. 79). When Subordinates and Superordinates are present, participants are related by means of single-levelled or multi-levelled overt taxonomy. In single-levelled overt taxonomies, the participants are shown in a tree structure to indicate the hierarchal relationships. In multi-levelled overt taxonomies the Superordinate is connected to other participants through a tree structure with more than two levels. When participants are portrayed in a symmetrical equivalence, in order to emphasize their timeless essence, the taxonomy is defined ‘covert’. Analytical processes connect participants according to a part-whole structure. In this type of process participants are the Carrier, which represents the whole, and the Possessive Attributes, which represent the parts. An example of Analytical process may be provided by Figure 1.6 which represents two people dressed in typical Venetian costumes.

26

Chapter One

FIGURE 1.6

Figure 1.6 is an analytical picture because there is no vector but three Carriers with Possessive Attributes. In this case, the Attributes refer to the typical masques and costumes of the Venetian carnival being worn by the man, the woman and the bird. The background is slightly blurred in order to emphasise the participants in the foreground. The picture is posed and this adds artificiality and a timeless nature to the representation. However, although this picture can be considered analytical, the scrutiny on the part of the viewer is not detached and impersonal. Indeed, the interactive system created by the gaze directly involves viewers and establishes an imaginary relationship with them. There is another category between the Conceptual Analytical and the Narrative processes: the Timeline. Although the temporal dimension addressed by the timeline may suggest Narrative processes, history is not represented as a gradual unfolding of events but according to successive stages with fixed and stable characteristics. For this reason, this description may be defined as a Temporal Analytical Process where the participants are arranged on an actual or imaginary line. Another type of Conceptual process is the Symbolic process which can be divided into Symbolic Attributive processes and Symbolic Suggestive processes and refers to what a participant means or is. In the Symbolic Attributive process there can be two participants, namely the Carrier, that is to say the participant whose meaning or identity is established in the relationship, and the Symbolic Attribute, that is to say the participant which represents the meaning or identity itself. Symbolic Attributes are objects that are made salient in the representation, for example, by being placed in the foreground through exaggerated size, being particularly well lit or represented in sharp focus or through their conspicuous colour. They can also be made important through a representation where they are pointed at, or where they look out

Systemic Functional Linguistics, Visual Grammar and Tourist Promotion 27

of place, or where they are conventionally associated with symbolic values. In the Symbolic Suggestive there is only one participant, the Carrier, whose symbolic meaning may be established in different ways. In Symbolic Suggestive images, details tend to be de-emphasized in favour of the atmosphere. This is achieved by blending the colours all together, or with extreme lighting which makes the participants appear as silhouettes. In this type of image meaning and identity come from the inside, from the qualities of the Carrier itself. In Figure 1.7, the colours of the background are strategically blended together into a soft golden brown which recalls a dream atmosphere whereas the gondolas in the foreground are in sharper focus and are represented with an extreme blue which make them salient in the representation. Venice is described as timeless, magic, precious and elegant.

FIGURE 1.7

1.2.2 Interactive meaning As stated above, Halliday’s Interpersonal metafunction refers to the interaction between speaker and listener. In images, this interaction is established by two kinds of participants: represented participants (the people, the places and things depicted in images) and interactive participants (the people who communicate with each other through images, the producers and viewers of images). The types of relations that can be established through the interaction of the represented and interactive participant are three, 1. relations between

Chapter One

28

represented participants; 2. relations between interactive and represented participants; and 3. relations between interactive participants. In this section, we are particularly interested in the second of the relationships listed above which is established when the represented participant and the interactive participants (the viewers) are connected in some way. Kress and Van Leeuwen (2006) have suggested four ways to examine the interactive meaning of images from three aspects (Table 1.5): Contact (demand, offer), Social Distance (intimate, social, or impersonal), Attitude (involvement, detachment) and Modality (real, not-real). TABLE 1.5. Interactive meaning Contact

demand offer

Social distance

close/far personal distance close/far social distance public distance

Interactive meaning involvement Attitude detachment real Modality unreal

FIGURE 1.8

Systemic Functional Linguistics, Visual Grammar and Tourist Promotion 29

FIGURE 1.9

The contact between participants can be established through the represented participant’s gaze. In this case, the vectors formed by the participants’ eyeline establish a contact at an imaginary level. This contact is the visual representation of Halliday’s ‘language in action’: there is a demand on the part of the represented participant and the object of this demand is the establishment of an imaginary relationship with the viewer (Figure 1.8). Viewers can also be addressed indirectly, that is to say when the connection is not established by the represented participant’s gaze. The situation which is created by this type of image is not that of a demand but rather that of an offer. The represented participants are depicted as objects of contemplation or items of information. This type of indirect address is more commonly used in tourist websites where represented participants are models of representation of the destination advertised. Figure 1.9 exemplifies the representation of an offer as suggested by the absence of gaze: the background is blurred whereas the woman in the foreground is in sharper focus. What is offered to the viewer is the feeling of wellbeing the woman is experiencing in the city of Venice. Another level of interpretation of the interactive meaning in visual communication is the Social Distance, which describes the different relationships that may exist between represented and interactive participants at different distances. Close personal distance is the distance between people who have an intimate relation, far personal distance is the distance at which subjects of personal interest are discussed, close social distance is the distance at which impersonal business occurs, far social distance is the distance at which impersonal business and social interaction

30

Chapter One

is conducted. Finally public distance is the distance between strangers (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006, p.124-125). Social distance is depicted in visual communication by different sizes of frame. The choice is between the close-up which corresponds to close personal distance (head and shoulders only as in Figure 1.8), the medium shot which corresponds to far personal distance (as in Figure 1.9 and Figure 1.10 where the participants are shown waist up) or the long shot, corresponding to far social distance (as in Figure 1.11 where the whole figure is depicted with space around it).

FIGURE 1.10

FIGURE 1.11

Another type of interactive meaning is Attitude which refers to the degree of involvement or detachment between participants. This meaning is achieved by perspective. Images can have a frontal or an oblique point of view and the choice of the former or of the latter implies different types of relation. The frontal angle suggests involvement as in Figure 1.8, where the close shot and the close personal distance contribute to the establishment of an intimate and involved relationship between the participants. The oblique angle represents detachment. However, involvement and detachment interact with demand and offer in very complex ways: for example, Figure 1.9 may seem to suggest detachment but at the same time it may represent a different world we want to be part of. Images can also have low or high angles. These two perspectives portray how a relation of power is established in pictures. If a represented participant is seen from a high angle, the relationship between interactive participants and represented participants is one in which the interactive participant has power over the represented one. Conversely, the low angle suggests a relation where the represented participant has power over the

Systemic Functional Linguistics, Visual Grammar and Tourist Promotion 31

interactive participant. If the picture is at eye level the relation is one of equality (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006, p. 140). Figure 1.12 is an example of top-down angle which is the angle of maximum power. It is oriented towards objective knowledge and contemplates the world from a god-like point of view, placing it at your feet rather than within reach of your hands as the frontal angle does (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006, p. 145).

FIGURE 1.12

Another parameter of the interactive meaning is modality, which has to do with the truth value or credibility of statements. In language, modality markers are verbs such as ‘will’, ‘must’, and ‘may’ and their related adjectives (Halliday 1985b, p. 85-89; Halliday and Mathiessen 2004, p. 147). In visual communication, modality contributes to the representation of people as though they were real or as though they did not actually exist (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006, p. 155). It is mainly established through by means of visual markers such as Colour saturation, Colour differentiation, Colour modulation, Contextualisation, Representation, Depth, Illumination, and Brightness. What is real and what is not real is inferred from the appearance of things and by their degree of correspondence with what we normally see in real life. If its colours are as saturated as those in standard illustrations, the image is judged real. Conversely, when colour becomes more saturated or less saturated, images are not real. In Figure 1.7, the colour of the background tends towards a golden-brown hue thus lowering modality and representing Venice more as a dream than as it really is. Conversely, the

Chapter One

32

gondolas have an excessive saturation which makes them similarly unreal, thus contributing to a dreamlike and fantastic atmosphere. Contextualization is a marker of visual modality which, if calculated on a scale, goes from absence of background to fully articulated and detailed background (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006, p. 161). Represented participants in a decontextualized setting are shown as typical examples of something, as in Figure 1.5, where the three seals are depicted against a blurred background. The marker of Representation goes from maximum abstraction to maximum representation of pictorial detail (ibid.). An image may show every detail of a participant or it may abstract from detail through a strategic use of sharpness of focus and exposure. The marker of Depth can be measured on a line running from absence of depth to maximally deep perspective while the marker of Illumination goes from the fullest representation of the play of light and shade to its absence. Finally, the marker of Brightness is a scale running from a maximum number of different degrees of brightness to just two degrees, such as black and white (ibid., p. 162).

1.2.3 Compositional meaning The way elements are placed and composed in images is strategically organized in order to convey certain meanings. Representational and interactive meanings of the image are combined by means of three interrelated systems which are the configuration of the Compositional meaning (Table 1.6): 1. Information value, which refers to the placement of elements in the various areas of the image (given and new, ideal or real, important or not important); 2. Salience, referring to the placement of elements in the foreground or background, their size, contrast in colours, sharpness etc.; 3. Framing, which is related to framing devices, such as dividing lines, frame lines, etc., which connect or disconnect elements. TABLE 1.6. Compositional meaning Information value Compositional meaning

Salience Framing

The elements presented in the left-hand side of a picture (or of the layout) are usually the Given elements, the already known elements

Systemic Functional Linguistics, Visual Grammar and Tourist Promotion 33

whereas the right-hand side of a picture is the side of the key information, the New. This interpretation of the placement of elements follows the Theme-Rheme structure developed by Halliday where Theme, that is to say the initial part of a sentence, usually corresponds to what interlocutors already know and the Rheme, that is to say the remaining part of the sentence, corresponds to the new information (see Section 1.1.3). Figure 1.9 is ideally divided into a left-hand and a right-hand section: the Given part is the blurred background representing Venice while the New information is the woman and her actions and state. The Information Value also resides in the top and bottom of the image. In a visual composition, what is placed in the upper part represents the ideal whereas what is placed in the lower part represents the real. In integrated texts, the real part could also be represented by the verbal message. Finally, an alternative way of organizing a visual composition can be by structuring it along the dimensions of centre and margin. What is placed at the centre of the composition is the nucleus of the information and what is placed along the margins is a dependent element. An example is Figure 1.13, where the castle is foregrounded and put at the centre of the visual space.

FIGURE 1.13

The system of Salience creates a hierarchy of elements in the composition and this is achieved through size, sharpness of focus, colour contrasts, etc. In Figure 1.9, the woman on the right side of the picture is the salient item because of her size, the sharpness of its colour, and the predominance of white which contrasts with the brown and yellow of the food on the tray and the blurred background. Finally, the system of Framing represents the third key element of a composition and creates connection or disconnection between the elements of the visual composition. This (dis)connection is created through continuity

34

Chapter One

or discontinuity of colour or of shape, groups of elements or individual elements, empty spaces and frame lines. In Figure 1.14, disconnection between elements is achieved through contrast between the light blue of sea and sky, the white of the sand and the grey-brown of the small island with a sighting tower. The vectors formed by the shape of the beach also contribute to the creation of detachment. In this figure, the meaningful elements of the composition are separated as if constituting different types of information, that is to say white sand, blue sky and heritage.

FIGURE 1.14

FIGURE 1.15

The same can be said for Figure 1.15, where disconnection is created by the sinuous and horizontal curves of the lake, which contrast with the vertical vectors represented by the trees, the mountains and the two cyclists. Furthermore, the blue of the lake contrasts with the light green of the grass, with the dark green of the trees, with the white of the mountain top, and with the colours of the cyclists’ outfits. All these colour contrasts make the element disconnected, as different pieces of information are delivering a message. This brief overview of Kress and van Leeuwen’s approach aims to give an idea of the several meanings embedded in an image and provides the framework for the analyses carried out in the following section. The three websites promoting Italy, Great Britain and Australia will be analysed through an integrated approach which combines Halliday’s theories on language and Kress and van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar.

Systemic Functional Linguistics, Visual Grammar and Tourist Promotion 35

1.3 The official tourist websites of Italy, Great Britain and Australia As Lemke (2002, p. 303) suggests, language and visual representation have co-evolved culturally and historically to complement and supplement one another, to be co-ordinated and integrated. Particularly in multimedia products, semiotics is represented by this integration of verbal and visual resources for the achievement of full meaning. The interaction of word-, image-, and sound-based meanings in hypermedia is defined hypermodality (Lemke 2002, p. 300), which is therefore the conflation of hypertextuality and multimodality. A hypertext, in its simplest form, is a web of pages made multisequential by links (see Maci 2013). The aim of this section is the application of the approaches to verbal and visual communication discussed above to the analysis of three official portals for the tourist promotion of Italy (www.italia.it), Great Britain (www.visitbritain.co.uk) and Australia (www.australia.com)1. The analysis will focus on the way multimodal and intersemiotic configurations are selected and created in the three websites with particular attention to how the websites are structured and organized, to the type of language used (in terms of metafunctions), and to the features of the images selected for the homepages of the websites. The first of the three hypertexts analysed is www.italia.it which is the official website for the promotion of Italy as a tourist destination established by the Italian Minister of Heritage, Culture and Tourism in collaboration with the ACI (Automobile Club of Italy) a non-economic public entity, supervised by the former, which has among its own institutional purposes the promotion and development of domestic and international tourism and which has entrusted its management to the publishing company Unicity SpA. As stated in the legal information section, the www.italia.it site aims to promote the brand Italy in the tourism sector and to collect and spread tourist information relating to the country through the Internet. The analysis of a webpage should always start with the identification of clusters (Baldry and Thibault 2006, p. 31), that is to say of those textual units a page can be broken down into (Francesconi 2014, p. 133; 2016). These clusters have to be assessed by number, size, shape, dynamism, mode, placement, orientation and function (ibid.). This fragmentation into clusters is termed granularity (ibid.; Barthes [1970] 1975, p. 20).

1

The three websites were accessed from January to June 2015.

36

Chapter One

The website www.italia.it is characterised by substantial granularity due to the presence of several clusters (Figure 1.16).

FIGURE 1.16. Upper part of the homepage of www.italia.it

The analysis of the visual-organizational composition of the whole page is extremely useful in that this structure guides the eye in its transversals across the page (Lemke 2002, p. 310; Arnheim, 1956). The reading path refers to the trajectory followed by the gaze while reading a text and it is described in terms of directionality, continuity and predictability (Francesconi 2014, p. 134). The website www.italia.it shows a top frame with a very simple logo on the left consisting of the word Italia written in print. The vertical lines forming the letters are blue while the horizontal lines are either red or green. The dots of the two ‘i’s are yellow. The colours used are those usually associated with Italy and its flag. For this reason, the logo conveys easily accessible communicative/interpretative information. On the right of the logo, there are six links, namely Scopri l’Italia (Discover Italy), Idee di Viaggio (Travel Ideas), Notizie (News), Video (Videos), Info (Infos), Mappe (Maps), and a search bar. The main content of the page, which has a light-grey background, consists of several clusters: on the right of the page, immediately below the upper bar there is a side-scrolling gallery featuring pictures of Italian cities of art. The caption to these pictures is displayed on the bottom left of the picture and consists of a sky-blue box where Città d’arte (Cities of art) is written in white. This box slightly overlaps with a larger white box where the name of the city represented in the picture and the name of the

Systemic Functional Linguistics, Visual Grammar and Tourist Promotion 37

region where the city is located are identified: the former with a bigger font, sky-blue letters and white background, and the latter with a smaller font in a light grey colour. Following Holsanova et al. (2006), Francesconi (2014, p. 135) suggests that the biggest picture, which is usually positioned on the top-right of the semiotic space, captures the readers’ attention and acts as the entry point for the reading process. Although variables such as culture, age, attitude, etc. influence the reading path, the reader of tourist promotional texts, at a pre-trip stage, is a type of reader who is highly attracted by breathtaking pictures and subtle verbal solutions rather than densely written textual blocks (ibid.). Scrolling down the page and immediately below the pictures described above, there is a section named Idee di viaggio (Travel Ideas) followed by three pictures horizontally aligned showing three different destinations. Again, the captions to these pictures are presented differently: the sky-blue box with the word Montagna (Mountain) in white is followed by a skyblue link anchor to the activity proposed, for example Sciare in Abruzzo (Skiing in Abruzzo), and by the name of the destination in a smaller font in black. A similar structural organization is used for the section immediately below, which is labelled Scopri l’Italia (Discover Italy). The section Notizie (News), which is further down the page, shows eight links organized in two columns. These links consist in anchor links in sky-blue accompanied by a short textual description beneath and an accompanying very small image on the left. On the right-hand side of the page, which is smaller than the space devoted to the contents on the left-hand side, there are further links with accompanying images or logos and textual descriptions. These clusters contain contents that refer to Expo 2015, tourist cards and apps, on-line surveys, newsletter subscription, and the link www.verybello.it, an advertising campaign of Italian cultural events in collaboration with Expo 2015. The ordering of the page is vertical although each different unit is horizontally developed. This horizontal-and-vertical grid structure gives compositional unity to the page, reinforced by the light-grey backgrounds, the Italia logo, the sky-blue of the captions and the colours of the pictures which mainly represent blue skies and white and light-grey monuments and mountains (see Lemke 2002, p. 311). The strategic use of colour creates important cohesive ties and blue elements acquire prominence due to their contrast with the colour of the background. According to Lemke (ibid.) and on the basis of previous comments, the twin organizing principles of both text and visual images are structural, that is to say the principle of wholes and parts (e.g. lists, figure-and-

38

Chapter One

caption) and cohesive, the principle of similarities of salient features (e.g. colour, or typeface). Cohesiveness is then achieved through lexical repetition, links and references to the hypertheme Italy, colour contrasts, and the relevance of accompanying images. The textual units are comprised of headers, titles, and extended nominal groups, which act as anchors (links) and datasets (the textual accompaniment) referring to some other content to be found on another page (target). For this reason, the cohesive textual organization of the page is achieved through paratactic Elaboration (see section 1.1.1) The main function of the language of tourism is the persuasive function, that is to say, language is predominantly used to influence and affect the receivers’ behaviour. When language is used to exchange goods and services, interaction can be brought about in two ways: goods and services can be offered or can be demanded. In the former system, the speech function is that of the offer, in the latter the speech function is the command. Offer and command have different linguistic realizations. In order to make a command, the Mood type Imperative is chosen. In tourist websites, the Imperative structure most commonly used is the one consisting only of a Residue, as exemplified by the sentence ‘Discover London’, where ‘discover’ is a predicator and ‘London’ is a complement. An offer is typically expressed by a modulated interrogative where the meanings of modalisation (probability) and modulation (inclination and obligation) are involved. Modulation is expressed by ‘will’ and ‘shall’ expressing willingness, with a lexical verb of liking or desiring in the Predicator or in a complex Predicator with the Finite modulated, as in, for example ‘Would you like an adventure ….’ and ‘Would you like to visit …’. The home page of the website www.italia.it rarely uses the secondperson address apart from the example of Scopri l’Italia, a textual link which directs users to a section devoted to descriptions of Italian regions and cities. For this reason, the speech function that seems to be predominantly illustrated here is that of an offer which is elliptical of the modulated interrogative. An example is Idee di Viaggio which may be part of a longer clause containing Vorresti delle … (Would you like some …), such as in Vorresti delle idee di viaggio? (Would you like some travel ideas?). However, users are also addressed in terms of ‘demand for action’ when they are implicitly asked to click on one of the links to proceed to those and only those pages the designer has provided links to (Lemke 2002, p. 313). In terms of the semantic of exchange relations, the instructional links appear extremely complex (Lemke 2002, p. 319). In the Italian website,

Systemic Functional Linguistics, Visual Grammar and Tourist Promotion 39

this type of link can be found in the section Scopri l’Italia; for each region and for each province, together with a general description of the destination selected, the following links are provided: cosa vedere (what to see), cosa fare (what to do), cosa assaggiare (what to taste). Although these links, in theory, seem to offer only information, in practice they demand an action to read that particular information, that is to say they invite the reader to click on the link. Users perform a double action by clicking on the link: they accede to the demand for action and they demand action themselves. It is as if they asked ‘What can I see there?’ or ‘what do you suggest I should see there?’ (ibid.). Almost all of the pictures reported in the Città d’Arte section feature monuments, squares, ancient buildings and palaces, castles and churches, and rarely depict human participants. The Representational meaning is thus expressed through Conceptual images consisting of Symbolic Suggestive processes, where there is only one Participant (a castle, a church, …) whose symbolic meaning is conveyed by being foregrounded and put at the centre of the visual space (see Figure 1.17). In terms of interactive meanings, the rare presence of human participants suggests a type of communication which is more oriented towards the offer. Furthermore, most of the images have a frontal angle which represents the angle of maximum involvement. There are also examples of top-down angles mainly representing a part of the old town of cities, which put the viewer in a position of maximum power. In terms of modality, the participants are depicted with colours and details which make them extremely similar to their real counterparts. As for compositional meanings, elements are frequently foregrounded and put at the centre of the picture. Both foregrounded elements and backgrounds are sharp in focus and the colour contrasts do not aim at creating an alternative and more ideal representation of elements. In the section Idee di viaggio (Travel ideas), some human participants can also be observed. However, rather than being the main elements of the pictures, their role is marginal. These participants are usually tourists enjoying ski courses or old-town streets. Their size is extremely reduced and they are usually depicted with their back towards the viewer or in halfface. None of them seems to look at the viewer and no contact is established. In this case, human participants represent the stereotype of the tourist enjoying the destination described or advertised (see Figure 1.18).

40

Chapter One

FIGURE 1.17

FIGURE 1.18

Although a more systematic analysis based on several textual and visual examples would be needed to draw general conclusions, what appears from the results of this analysis is a type of promotion mainly based on ‘offer’ rather than on ‘demand’. The potential tourist is provided with a gallery of types (from monuments to activities), he or she can choose from. In order to apply the framework provided by SFL to the verbal texts on the Italian website, an introductory extract of the description of the city of Naples has been chosen (the translation provided below is available on the

Systemic Functional Linguistics, Visual Grammar and Tourist Promotion 41

English version of the website). This verbal text will be analysed in terms of Transitivity, Mood and Theme analysis. Napoli è una delle più grandi ed incantevoli città d’arte del Mediterraneo. Capoluogo della regione Campania è, per grandezza, il terzo comune italiano dopo Roma e Milano. La città domina l’omonimo golfo, che si estende dalla penisola sorrentina all’area vulcanica dei Campi Flegrei ed offre una vista molto suggestiva, con l’imponente vulcano Vesuvio e, in lontananza, tre magnifiche isole - Capri, Ischia e Procida - che sembrano piccoli gioielli sorti dal mare. Oltre ai suoi splendidi paesaggi, Napoli deve la sua meritata fama anche al fascino di un centro storico che racconta 2500 anni di storia ed è stato inserito nel 1995 nel World Heritage List dell’UNESCO. Napoli è una città dove le stratificazioni storiche e archeologiche creano itinerari di visita del tutto peculiari e incantevoli. Poco sopravvive di “Partenope”: la città greca delle origini è rintracciabile, ad esempio, nelle mura greche che passano per via Mezzocannone. Le rovine romane sono, invece, più numerose: tra le tante è situata in pieno centro l’area archeologica di San Lorenzo Maggiore, che ospita parte dell’agorà greca del V sec. a.C. e molti reperti romani di un'epoca in cui la città era già una ‘metropoli’. La vita quotidiana e artistica di Napoli si snoda per le sue vie e i suoi quartieri brulicanti di vita e di monumenti, dalla Sanità e dai quartieri spagnoli realizzati nel ‘500, zona popolare ricca di colori e folklore, agli itinerari che si snodano lungo le vie principali. Prendendo l’arteria stradale detta “Spaccanapoli” (perché divide in due la città antica), i visitatori potranno partire dalla Chiesa del Gesù Nuovo, con la sua facciata recuperata da un palazzo signorile del ‘400, passare per la Basilica di San Domenico Maggiore di epoca angioina e arrivare, risalendo via Duomo, alla magnifica Cattedrale. Ristrutturato più volte per riparare ai danni sismici, il Duomo si sovrappone a edifici preesistenti e deve lo slancio verticale dell’odierna facciata ad Enrico Alvino, architetto dell’Ottocento. All’interno è da visitare la Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro che custodisce, fra le altre cose, reliquie del sangue del santo. (Naples is one of the largest and most captivating art cities on the Mediterranean Sea. Capital of the Region of Campania, it is the thirdlargest commune in Italy after Rome and Milan. The city dominates the Gulf of Naples, expanding from the Sorrentine Peninsula to the volcanic area of the Phlegraean Fields. It offers an extremely evocative vista of not only the imposing Vesuvian mount but also the three magnificent islands of Capri, Ischia and Procida – three jewels that rise like Venus from the sea. Besides its gorgeous scenery, Naples owes its much-deserved fame to the charm and intrigue of its historic center – a historic center that counts 2500 years of a fascinating existence, and that was therefore added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1995.

42

Chapter One Naples is a city of historic and archaeological layers that weave perfectly peculiar and enchanting visiting itineraries. Very little survives today of ancient Neapolis: the city of Greek origins has left behind a few visible traces, however, such as the Greek walls that run along Via Mezzocannone. The Roman ruins are, on the other hand, quite numerous: among the many still remaining are the archaeological site of San Lorenzo Maggiore, part of which hosts a Greek agora from the 5th Century B.C.; as well as many other finds from the Roman era, when the city was a true metropolis. Both the quotidian and the artistic fill the streets and quarters of Naples that teem with life and monuments, from the Sanità neighbourhood and the Spanish Quarter – a working class area rich in color and folklore, realized in the 1500s – to the large main boulevards of the city. Taking one of the main thoroughfares, “Spaccanapoli” (from spaccare in Italian, meaning “it divides the new city in two”), visitors can begin with the Church of Gesù Nuovo, with its facade taken from a noble palace of the 1400s. Afterwards, one would do no wrong to pass by the Basilica of San Domenico Maggiore - built during Anjou rule – and then stop off at Naples’s magnificent Cathedral, just up Via Duomo. Repaired several times after seismic damages, the Duomo sits atop the remains of pre-existing buildings; the vertical lift of its façade can be attributed to Enrico Alvino, architect during the 1800s. The interior boasts the pretty Chapel of the Treasury of St. Gennaro, who watches over, among other items, relics of his own blood.)

In order to analyse how the text expresses the Ideational metafunction and the Textual metafunction through the grammar system of Transitivity and of the Theme-Rheme system, the analysis of processes, participants, circumstances and Theme structure in tourist texts will be carried out, following Eggins (2011) and Francesconi (2014): Processes: material (Pm), mental (Pme), attributive (Pa), identifying (Pi), behavioural (Pb), verbal (Pv), existential (Pe). Participants: Actor (A), Goal (G), Beneficiary (B), Senser (S), Phenomenon (Ph), Carrier (C), Attribute (At), Token (T), Value (V), Behaver (B), Sayer (Sy), Target (T), Existent (E), Verbiage (Vb). Circumstance of location (Cl), of extent (Cx), of manner (Cm), of cause (Cc), of accompaniment (Ca), of matter (Ct), of role (Co). Theme is underlined. Napoli (C) è (Pa) una delle più grandi ed incantevoli città d’arte del Mediterraneo (At). Capoluogo della regione Campania (At) è (Pa), per grandezza (Cc), il terzo comune italiano dopo Roma e Milano (At). La città (A) domina (Pm) l’omonimo golfo (G), che (T) si estende (Pi) dalla penisola sorrentina all’area vulcanica dei Campi Flegrei (Cl) ed offre (Pi)

Systemic Functional Linguistics, Visual Grammar and Tourist Promotion 43 una vista molto suggestiva (G), con l’imponente vulcano Vesuvio (Cc) e, in lontananza (Cl), tre magnifiche isole - Capri, Ischia e Procida (G) – che (T) sembrano (Pi) piccoli gioielli (At) sorti (Pa) dal mare (At). Oltre ai suoi splendidi paesaggi (Cc), Napoli (A) deve (Pm) la sua meritata fama (G) anche al fascino di un centro storico (Cc) che (Sy) racconta (Pv) 2500 anni di storia (Vb) ed è stato inserito (Pi) nel 1995 (Cx) nel World Heritage List dell’UNESCO (G). Napoli (C) è (Pa) una città (At) dove le stratificazioni storiche e archeologiche (A) creano (Pm) itinerari di visita del tutto peculiari e incantevoli (G). Poco (A) sopravvive (Pm) di “Partenope” (G): la città greca delle origini (C) è rintracciabile (Pa), ad esempio, nelle mura greche (Cl) che (A) passano (Pm) per via Mezzocannone (Cl). Le rovine romane (C) sono (Pa), invece, più numerose (At): tra le tante (Cl) è situata (Pa) in pieno centro (Cl) l’area archeologica di San Lorenzo Maggiore (C), che (A) ospita (Pm) parte dell’agorà greca (G) del V sec. a.C. (Cx) e molti reperti romani (G) di un'epoca in cui (Cx) la città (C) era (Pa) già una ‘metropoli’ (At). La vita quotidiana e artistica di Napoli (A) si snoda (Pm) per le sue vie e i suoi quartieri (G) brulicanti (Pa) di vita e di monumenti (At), dalla Sanità e dai quartieri spagnoli (Cl) realizzati (Pm) nel ‘500 (Cx), zona popolare ricca di colori e folklore (At), agli itinerari (G) che (A) si snodano (Pm) lungo le vie principali (G). Prendendo (Pm) l’arteria stradale (G) detta (Pa) “Spaccanapoli” (At) (perché divide (Pm) in due (Cm) la città antica (G)), i visitatori (A) potranno partire (Pm) dalla Chiesa del Gesù Nuovo (Cl), con la sua facciata (A) recuperata (Pm) da un palazzo signorile (G) del ‘400 (Cx), passare (Pm) per la Basilica di San Domenico Maggiore (G) di epoca angioina (Cx) e arrivare (Pm), risalendo (Pm) via Duomo (G), alla magnifica Cattedrale (G). Ristrutturato (Pa) più volte (Cx) per riparare (Pm) ai danni sismici (G), il Duomo (A) si sovrappone (Pm) a edifici preesistenti (G) e deve (Pm) lo slancio verticale dell’odierna facciata (G) ad Enrico Alvino (B), architetto (At) dell’Ottocento (Cx). All’interno (Cl) è da visitare (Pa) la Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro (C) che (A) custodisce (Pm), fra le altre cose, reliquie del sangue del santo (G).

In this short extract of 339 words, Transitivity is expressed through 36 processes: 20 Material processes, 11 Attributive processes, 4 Identifying processes and only 1 Verbal process. This means that the description of Naples is mainly constructed by using material verbs and partly by Attributive processes. As for Circumstances, those of Location are more frequently used (9 occurrences), followed by Extent (8 occurrences), Cause (4 occurrences), and only 1 Circumstance of Manner. Francesconi (2014, p. 58ff), in her Transitivity analysis of the 2009 Malta, Gozo and Comino brochure issued by the official Maltese tourist board, shows that the text mainly focuses on the description of the Maltese islands linguistically constructed by Attributive processes. Material verbs

44

Chapter One

referred to through metaphorically expressed actions and performed by the personified destination towards potential visitors, were less frequent. However, one of the reasons for this difference is undoubtedly the difference of genre type. In terms of Theme-Rheme structure, out of 18 Themes, 12 of them are unmarked in that they conflate with the subject. Cohesion is mainly given by a thematic progression where Themes refer to the hypertheme, Naples, and, in some cases, where Themes derive from preceding Rhemes. These interesting insights will be the object of comparison using the results from the analysis of similar descriptions of a British city in the website www.visitbritain.co.uk and of an Australian one in the www.australia.com website. The same text also performs the Interpersonal function, fulfilled by the system of Mood. What follows below is the analysis of the same text in terms of this system. Francesconi’s model (2014, p. 61) has been adapted here as well. Subject (S), Finite (F), negative (Fn), modalised (Fms), modulated (Fml). Predicator (P), modulated Predicator (Pml), modalised Predicator (Pms), fused Finite and Predicator (F/P). Complement (C), attributive Complement (Ca), Adjunct (A), circumstantial (Ac), mood (Am), comment (Ao), polarity (Ap), vocative (Av), conjunctive (Aj), continuity (At). Napoli (S) è (F) una delle più grandi ed incantevoli città d’arte (Ca) del Mediterraneo (Ac). Capoluogo della regione Campania (Ca) è (F), per grandezza (Ac), il terzo comune italiano dopo Roma e Milano (Ca). La città (S) domina (F/P) l’omonimo golfo (C), che (S) si estende (F/P) dalla penisola sorrentina all’area vulcanica dei Campi Flegrei (Ac) ed offre (F/P) una vista molto suggestiva (C), con l’imponente vulcano Vesuvio (Ac) e, in lontananza (Ac), tre magnifiche isole - Capri, Ischia e Procida – (Ac) che (S) sembrano (F/P) piccoli gioielli sorti dal mare (C). Oltre ai suoi splendidi paesaggi (Ac), Napoli (S) deve (F/P) la sua meritata fama (C) anche al fascino di un centro storico (Ac) che (S) racconta (F/P) 2500 anni di storia (C) ed è (F) stato inserito (P) nel 1995 (Ac) nel World Heritage List dell’UNESCO (C). Napoli (S) è (F) una città (C) dove (Aj) le stratificazioni storiche e archeologiche (S) creano (F/P) itinerari di visita del tutto peculiari e incantevoli (C). Poco (S) sopravvive (F/P) di “Partenope” (C): la città greca delle origini (S) è (F) rintracciabile (A), ad esempio, nelle mura greche (C) che (S) passano (F/P) per via Mezzocannone (C). Le rovine romane (S) sono (F), invece, più numerose (A): tra le tante (Ac) è (F) situata (P) in pieno centro (Ac) l’area archeologica di San Lorenzo

Systemic Functional Linguistics, Visual Grammar and Tourist Promotion 45 Maggiore (C), che (S) ospita (F/P) parte dell’agorà greca (C) del V sec. a.C. (Ac) e (Aj) molti reperti romani (C) di un'epoca (Ac) in cui (Aj) la città (S) era (F) già una ‘metropoli’ (Ca). La vita quotidiana e artistica di Napoli (S) si snoda (F/P) per le sue vie e i suoi quartieri brulicanti di vita e di monumenti (Ac), dalla Sanità e dai quartieri spagnoli (Ac) realizzati (P) nel ‘500 (Ac), zona popolare ricca di colori e folklore (Ca), agli itinerari (Ac) che (S) si snodano (F/P) lungo le vie principali (Ac). Prendendo (P) l’arteria stradale detta (P) “Spaccanapoli” (C) (perché (Aj) divide (F/P) in due (Ac) la città antica (C)), i visitatori (S) potranno (Fml) partire (P) dalla Chiesa del Gesù Nuovo (Ac), con la sua facciata (Ac) recuperata (P) da un palazzo signorile (C) del ‘400 (Ac), passare (P) per la Basilica di San Domenico Maggiore (C) di epoca angioina (Ac) e (Aj) arrivare (P), risalendo (P) via Duomo (C), alla magnifica Cattedrale (C). Ristrutturato (P) più volte (Ac) per riparare ai danni sismici (C), il Duomo (S) si sovrappone (F/P) a edifici preesistenti (C) e (Aj) deve (F/P) lo slancio verticale dell’odierna facciata ad Enrico Alvino (C), architetto (C) dell’Ottocento (Ac). All’interno (Ac) è (F) da visitare (P) la Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro (C) che (S) custodisce (F/P), fra le altre cose (Ac), reliquie del sangue del santo (C).

This short passage, chosen for analysis, reveals interesting insights into the way the Italian website aims to promote domestic and international tourism in Italy and to spread tourist information relating to the country. First of all, a preponderant use of the declarative mood and the absence of Imperative or interrogative forms can be observed. This means that the dialogic interaction is achieved solely through the system of offer and never through demand, because the main aim is providing information, a function usually performed by declaratives. These linguistic features make the language used in this extract more similar to a tourist guide than to a website, the latter being mainly characterised by a medium high-score in terms of interrogative forms and a frequent occurrence of expressions of modality (Castello, 2001; Francesconi, 2016). The extract analysed above does not have any Modal Adjunct which would contribute to dialogic interaction. There is only one example of Modulation represented by potranno (can/will be able to), in the sentence I visitatori potranno partire dalla Chiesa di Gesù Nuovo (‘visitors can start from the Gesù Nuovo Church’). Modulation aims to get people to behave in a particular way and can describe an offer or a command: in this case it represents a rare use of command in the extract. In order to compare the official tourist promotion of Italy with those of Great Britain and Australia, the analysis proceeds with a closer examination of the website www.visitbritain.co.uk.

46

Chapter One

As stated in the link www.visitbritain.org, VisitBritain is a national tourism agency, a non-departmental public body, funded by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, responsible for promoting Great Britain worldwide. Its mission is to increase the value of inbound tourism to Britain, working with a wide range of partners in both Britain and overseas, to increase visitor spending in all parts of Britain and improve Britain’s ranking in the eyes of international visitors. At the top of the page, on the right, there are two logos: one of Visit Britain consisting of the British flag represented as a square and with one of the larger red stripes curving over and around the bottom-left angle. The other logo consists of a red rectangle with the word ‘Great’, written in block letters and in white, occupying the whole space of the rectangle; ‘Britain’ is written below the rectangle in a smaller font and in black, and further below, ‘you’re invited’ is written in red and in italics and is slightly diagonal. Both logos, when clicked on, redirect the viewer to the homepage of the website. On the left of the logos, there is a search bar and the language-option button. Below the two logos, but in the same white rectangular box containing them, there are seven links: Destination and maps, Things to do, Accommodation, Transport, About Britain, Travel Tips, VisitBritain Shop. This first cluster is followed by a bigger one occupying the whole page from left to right: it is a side scrolling gallery featuring travel ideas, activities, events or features of the websites, such as a video on the sounds of Great Britain. The scrolling is not automatic but requires the viewer to select the pictures on a smaller side-scrolling gallery below the larger one. Below the gallery, the homepage is divided into a right section occupying a larger space and a left section. In the right-hand area, there are seven sections consisting of a picture and an accompanying textual description: ‘Visit Britain videos’, ‘Perfect UK destination’, ‘WIN A TRIP TO LONDON’ (in block letters), ‘Countryside’, ‘Culture’, ‘Heritage’, ‘Get to know the North East’. The latter section has a different layout, in that instead of having an image with a textual description alongside and being developed horizontally, the accompanying picture is placed below the title of the section and is bigger than the images situated in the other sections. On the left of the homepage, a reddish-purple link invites viewers to subscribe to the website newsletter. Further below, there is a section where registered users can upload their pictures of Great Britain, a section devoted to Discount and Deals to be bought from the VisitBritain online shop, and finally the picture of a pheasant with a cartoon bubble saying: ‘Well, hello! You’re looking fabulous today. Come on in and take a good look around!’.

Systemic Functional Linguistics, Visual Grammar and Tourist Promotion 47

As for colours, the background is white and the accompanying captions and textual descriptions are in black. The sections are divided by thick blue, green and purple lines. Cohesion is mainly achieved by the colour of the background and the way in which the various sections are organised in the layout. In terms of language, what immediately catches our attention is the use of the second-person address in captions and in the short textual descriptions of each section. Examples are: ‘Explore the best of Britain on video, through our YouTube channel’, ‘Take a look at our exciting new widget and discover the perfect UK destinations’, ‘Win a trip to the capital and explore London’s world-class cultural offering’, ‘See sparkling Scottish lochs, relax in historic gardens and bask on the beaches of the South Coast’, ‘Visit the house where Shakespeare was born, climb cathedral spires or uncover the Tower of London’s dark history’, ‘Discover the North East and all the iconic landmarks with our North East England Guide’. The predominant speech function is, therefore, not the offer, as it occurs on the Italian website, but rather the demand, where the Imperative creates a high dialogic interaction. Apart from the side-scrolling gallery which features a total of four pictures and a video, on the rest of the homepage there are five other pictures and two videos. Half of all the pictures on the homepage (including those in the gallery) depict natural landscapes. What is interesting is that in the three cases in which an iconic British monument is featured, the real subject of the picture is not the monument itself (apart from one image depicting the inside of a church) but rather an event or activities that can be enjoyed nearby. Just to give an idea of the type of pictures being discussed here but which unfortunately were not authorised to be reprinted in this volume, we can take a look at Figure 1.19 and Figure 1.20 reported below. In Figure 1.19, more than Liverpool itself, it is the water of its port which is emphasised by being foregrounded, while the mist rising from the water neutralises colours creating a timeless atmosphere. Similarly, Caernarvon castle visible in the background of Figure 1.20 is not the main participant in the picture. Indeed, it is placed in the background, in a central position, and its details are de-emphasized in favour of the atmosphere. Colours are blended together into the same blue-greenish hue. The two pictures are both examples of Symbolic Suggestive pictures where meaning and identity come from the inside and represent places as magic, mysterious and timeless.

48

Chapter One

FIGURE 1.19

FIGURE 1.20

As for pictures depicting natural landscapes on the British website, no human participants are represented. These images are characterised by a system of framing where the different elements comprising the landscape create disconnection and/or discontinuity of colour, as visible in Figure 1.21 and 1.22.

Systemic Functional Linguistics, Visual Grammar and Tourist Promotion 49

FIGURE 1.21

FIGURE 1.22

In order to make a closer comparison with the Italian verbal descriptions commented on in the previous section, the description of the city of Belfast has been chosen for analysis. The text has 425 running words. The grammar system of Transitivity and the Theme-Rheme system have been analysed following Eggins (2011) and Francesconi (2014): Processes: material (Pm), mental (Pme), attributive (Pa), identifying (Pi), behavioural (Pb), verbal (Pv), existential (Pe). Participants: Actor (A), Goal (G), Beneficiary (B), Senser (S), Phenomenon (Ph), Carrier (C), Attribute (At), Token (T), Value (V), Behaver (B), Sayer (Sy), Target (T), Existent (E), Verbiage (Vb). Circumstance of location (Cl), of extent (Cx), of manner (Cm), of cause (Cc), of accompaniment (Ca), of matter (Ct), of role (Co). Theme is underlined. Belfast – Discover (Pm) Northern Ireland's capital (G) Learn (Pm) everything about Belfast from its historic landmarks like Belfast Castle and Belfast City Hall to its unique blend of traditional and modern culture (G).

50

Chapter One The gateway to Northern Ireland Culture and heritage The birthplace of the Titanic (At), Belfast’s industrial heritage (A) has shaped (Pm) a city (G) steeped (Pa) in culture (At). The great exhibitions at the Ulster Museum (A) reveal (Pm) the bigger picture of the city’s heritage (G) (and at Culturlann (Cl) you (A)’ll even get (Pm) the people's stories (G). While you (T) are (Pi) in the area (Cl), take (Pm) a tour of those world-famous political murals (G). Attractions Belfast (C) is (Pa) packed full of attractions to suit all ages and interests (At). Sitting (Pm) on the slopes of Cave Hill, 400ft above sea level (Cl), Belfast Castle (C) is (Pa) a must-see (At). If you (A)’re visiting (Pm) the city (G) with children Ca), don’t miss (Pm) W5, a great interactive museum with fascinating exhibitions (G). And in the summer (Cx), there’s (Pe) no better place to relax than the Sir Thomas and Lady Dixon Park or Cave Hill Country Park (E). Top daytime must-do's Take (Pm) a free guided tour of the magnificent renaissance style Belfast City Hall (G). Relax (Pme) with a walk through the beautiful Redburn Country Park (Ph). Discover (Pm) the history behind the world-famous Queen's University (G). Take (Pm) a boat trip to the Harland & Wolff Shipyards (G) where Titanic (A) was built (Pm). Top night time must-do's Enjoy (Pme) a west end production (Ph) at the stunning Grand Opera House (Cl). Watch (Pm) a film in style (G) – on the giant screen at the Odyssey Arena (Cl). For something different (Cc), catch (Pm) a performance (G) at the Crescent Arts Centre (Cl). Food and drink Since local celebrity chef Paul Rankin (A) first (Cx) put (Pm) Belfast (G) on the culinary map (Cl), the culinary scene (A) in Belfast (Cl) has flourished (Pm). From Michelin Star excellence, upmarket city centre fusion restaurants, cosy neighbourhood brasseries, authentic Asian cuisine to traditional Irish pub grub (G) – you (A)’ll find (Pm) something to suit all tastes and budgets (G) in Belfast (Cl). Shopping Belfast (A) offers (Pm) a wonderful array of shops (G). A must for all shoppers (At) is (Pa) the central shopping area (C), which (A) runs (Pm) from Donegall Place to Royal Avenue (Cl), and Lisburn Road (A) in the south of the city (Cl) boasts (Pm) a trail of chic designer boutiques (G).

Systemic Functional Linguistics, Visual Grammar and Tourist Promotion 51 But don’t limit (Pm) yourself (G) to the city centre (Cl)– there are (Pe) many fine shopping centres (E) throughout the city and its suburbs (Cl). Buy (Pm) before you fly (Cx) There’s (Pe) a lot to see and do (E) in Belfast (Cx). So don’t waste (Pm) time (G) standing (Pm) in queues (Cl), buy (Pm) your travel passes and attraction tickets (G) online (Cl)! With the BritRail Pass + Ireland (Ca), you (A) can hop (Pm) on a train (Cl) wherever and whenever you (S) want (Pme) and see (Pme) the country (Ph) at your own pace (Cm). For more great Belfast offers (G), go (Pm) to VisitBritain Shop (Cl).

As for Theme-Rheme, out of 34 Themes, only nine of them are marked and are mainly comprised of Circumstances and Attributes. The result is a text, whose cohesion is achieved through constant focus on the hypertheme Belfast and its attributes. The text is easy and the information provided is immediately accessible. In the analysis of the Theme-Rheme structure of the Italian text, only 18 Themes were identified, that is to say almost half of those which are present in the English text. Even though differences in terms of the total number of words in the text are taken into account, the result seems to suggest that the Italian description tends to rely more on larger groups of subjects, complements, circumstantial or attributes. Out of 40 process types found in this text, 28 of them are Material processes, 4 are Attributive Processes and another 4 are Mental processes (4 occurrences). There are 3 Existential processes and only 1 is an Identifying process. The predominant use of Material processes was also a feature of the Italian text, although Attributive Processes represented 33% of the total choices. In this text, Attributive Processes represent 11% of choices. Mental Processes were absent in the Italian text and here represent about 11% of choices. However, in more than half of the Material Processes identified, the subject of the process is not the destination being described but the visitors themselves with reference to the various activities that can be enjoyed in the city. In order to detect interesting differences in the system of Mood, the same text will also be analysed in terms of interpersonal function and of the systems through which it is configured. Subject (S), Finite (F), negative (Fn), modalised (Fms), modulated (Fml). Predicator (P), modulated Predicator (Pml), modalised Predicator (Pms), fused Finite and Predicator (F/P). Complement (C), attributive Complement (Ca), Adjunct (A), circumstantial (Ac), mood (Am), comment (Ao), polarity (Ap), vocative (Av), conjunctive (Aj), continuity (At).

52

Chapter One Belfast – Discover (P) Northern Ireland's capital (C) Learn (P) everything about Belfast from its historic landmarks like Belfast Castle and Belfast City Hall to its unique blend of traditional and modern culture (C). The gateway to Northern Ireland Culture and heritage The birthplace of the Titanic (Ca), Belfast’s industrial heritage (S) has (F) shaped (P) a city (C) steeped (P) in culture (Ac). The great exhibitions (S) at the Ulster Museum (Ac) reveal (F/P) the bigger picture of the city’s heritage (C) (and (Aj) at Culturlann (Ac) you (S)’ll (F) even (Ao) get (P) the people's stories (C). While (Aj) you (S) are (F) in the area (Ac), take (P) a tour of those world-famous political murals (C). Attractions Belfast (S) is (F) packed full of attractions (Ca) to suit all ages and interests. Sitting (F/P) on the slopes of Cave Hill (Ac), 400ft above sea level (Ac), Belfast Castle (S) is (F) a must-see (Ca). If (Aj) you (S) ’re (F) visiting (P) the city (C) with children (Ac), don’t (Fn) miss (P) W5, a great interactive museum with fascinating exhibitions (C). And (Aj) in the summer (Ac), there (S) ’s (F) no better place to relax than the Sir Thomas and Lady Dixon Park or Cave Hill Country Park (C) . Top daytime must-do's Take (P) a free guided tour of the magnificent renaissance style Belfast City Hall (C). Relax (P) with a walk (C) through the beautiful Redburn Country Park (Ac). Discover (P) the history behind the world-famous Queen's University (C). Take (P) a boat trip (C) to the Harland & Wolff Shipyards (Ac) where (Aj) Titanic (S) was (F) built (P). Top night time must-do's Enjoy (P) a west end production (C) at the stunning Grand Opera House (Ac). Watch (P) a film in style (C) – on the giant screen at the Odyssey Arena (Ac). For something different (Ac), catch (P) a performance (C) at the Crescent Arts Centre (Ac). Food and drink Since (Aj) local celebrity chef Paul Rankin (S) first (Ac) put (F/P) Belfast (C) on the culinary map (Ac), the culinary scene (S) in Belfast (Ac) has (F) flourished (P). From Michelin Star excellence, upmarket city centre fusion restaurants, cosy neighbourhood brasseries, authentic Asian cuisine to traditional Irish pub grub (Ac) – you (S) ’ll (F) find (P) something to suit all tastes and budgets (C) in Belfast (Ac).

Systemic Functional Linguistics, Visual Grammar and Tourist Promotion 53 Shopping Belfast (S) offers (F/P) a wonderful array of shops (C). A must for all shoppers (Ca) is (F) the central shopping area (S), which (S) runs (F/P) from Donegall Place to Royal Avenue (Ac), and (Aj) Lisburn Road (S) in the south of the city (Ac) boasts (F/P) a trail of chic designer boutiques (C). But (Aj) don’t (Fn) limit (P) yourself (C) to the city centre (Ac) – there (S) are (F) many fine shopping centres (C) throughout the city and its suburbs (Ac). Buy (P) before you fly There’(S) s (F) a lot to see and do (C) in Belfast (Ac). So (Aj) don’t (Fn) waste (P) time (C) standing (P) in queues (Ac), buy (P) your travel passes and attraction tickets (C) online (Ac)! With the BritRail Pass + Ireland (Ac), you (S) can (Fms) hop (P) on a train (Ac) wherever and whenever (Aj) you (S) want (F/P) and (Aj) see (F/P) the country (C) at your own pace (Ac). For more great Belfast offers (Ac), go (P) to VisitBritain Shop (Ac).

As described in section 1.1.2, the Interpersonal meaning of language may concern the exchange of information or the exchange of goods and services; furthermore, both information and goods and services can be given or demanded. These meanings are expressed in the wordings of the lexicogrammatical level (Butt et al. 2003, p. 86). The text analysed adopts a style which uses a high number of Imperative clauses, typically involving Predicator and optional additional elements such as Complements and Circumstantial Adjuncts, that is to say the Residue only. In three cases, the Imperative mood is also formed by a negative Finite, thus including the Mood block, as in ‘don’t miss’, ‘don’t limit’, and ‘don’t waste’. Another Imperative with Mood block is the example ‘you can hop’ where the Finite is a modal, denoting low obligation or permission. The Imperative clause functions as an indication that the text is doing more than simply giving information or that the information it gives has the potential to be packaged as goods and service. This means that the information provided should be read as ‘advice’ and invitation. The role of the writer is, therefore, that of an adviser, an expert, which implies a relation of unequal power with the reader where boundaries rather than solidarity are created by the tenor of the task (Eggins 2011, p. 333). In declarative clauses, whose purpose is descriptive, the reader has the role of acknowledger of the information being exchanged in the text. This exchange of information is realised through the system of offer. Although declarative clauses do not imply dialogic interactions, in this text, the alternation between declarative clauses offering information and of Imperative clauses demanding action, create a well-balanced interaction

54

Chapter One

which contribute to the unfolding of the persuasive function, typical of tourist texts. The last analysis proposed in this chapter concerns the official website for the tourist promotion of Australia, www.australia.com, developed by Tourism Australia, that is to say the Australian Government statutory authority responsible for international and domestic tourism marketing as well as the delivery of research and forecasts for the tourism sector. The homepage of this website is quite different from the two homepages analysed so far. At the top of the Australian homepage, there are two frames: one is blue and contains two links. The two link anchors are on the left of the frame and correspond to ‘Holidays in Australia’ and to ‘Plan a Business Event’, both written in white. On the right of the page, in a smaller font there is a welcoming message ‘Welcome to the official Australian tourism website’, and a link to further information on the use of cookies in the website. Below the first top frame, there is another top frame, of a blue-greenish colour, with the official logo of Australia and three links ‘Things to do’, ‘Places to go’, ‘Plan your trip’. The logo is a stylised kangaroo, depicted in different colours, with a yellow circle, in the background, representing the Australian sun. On the left of the logo, ‘Australia’ is written in white and in small block letters. On the left of the frame, three icons, a magnifying glass, a small, white image of Australia and a heart, redirect the viewer to a search bar, a detailed map and an archive of the pages that the viewer has selected. However, what differentiates this website from the other two is featured below the top frames: a video, occupying all of the visual space allowed by the computer screen, showing iconic Australian locations at different moments of the day (starting with the first light of day, right through to sunset), which starts as soon as the web user connects to the homepage. Images are accelerated and are accompanied by background music and the text ‘There’s nothing like Australia’ which appears and disappears over the video images. At the end of the video, the half circle symbolizing the sun’s path from sunrise to sunset, becomes static and encloses eight destinations represented by images in small circles with their names below them. At the centre of the half circle there is a white picture of the Australian continent which interactively shows where the eight destinations are. Scrolling down the homepage, a two-line textual message invites the users to actively use the website: ‘Create your dream holiday to Australia’, and in smaller font ‘Choose what you like. Do what you love’. This message is followed by a cluster made up of two big pictures. These

Systemic Functional Linguistics, Visual Grammar and Tourist Promotion 55

pictures change when clicking on a circle that is placed between the two images. At the centre of each picture, a textual accompaniment labels the section that this picture refers to: ‘Arts and Culture’, ‘Islands’, ‘Beaches’, ‘Major Events’, ‘Adventure’, ‘Sports’, ‘Nature and Wildlife’, ‘Food and Wine’, ‘Outback Australia’, ‘Aboriginal Australia’. These two clusters are followed by a further nine clusters apparently composed only of pictures: however, when the mouse passes over them, the image turns into text, and names of places or of events show up. The last element of the homepage is the text ‘Want to join the conversation? Find out how’, where the elliptical question shortens the distance between the interlocutors and increases dialogic interaction. The limited amount of text present on the homepage is however, highly interactive due to the presence of Imperative forms and questions which belong to the system of demand for goods and services. As already mentioned above, images play a fundamental role in this website. They are bigger than those reported in both the Italian and British websites and are not accompanied by textual descriptions but rather by labels referring to sections of the websites or to destination names. What is interesting about these images is that many of them feature animated participants (human and animal) that in some cases aim to establish a contact with the viewer. For example, out of 19 pictures which are present on the homepage, 12 feature animated participants. These participants, however, perform different roles. Figure 1.23, for example, is a Conceptual image performing Symbolic Attributive processes. The Carrier is the kangaroo which is made salient by being depicted at the centre of the image and by the colour contrast of its fur with the white sandy beach on which it stands. At the interactive level, connection is established through the kangaroo’s gaze. Figure 1.24 is an example of Narrative image performing Reactional processes. This is due to the presence of vectors which emanate from the turtle and from the diver. Similar to Figure 1.23, connection is established through the diver’s gaze and this type of highly interactive address represents a demand on the part of the interactive participants, a sort of invitation to become part of that world.

56

Chapter One

FIGURE 1.23

FIGURE 1.24

In the other cases where animated participants are depicted, connection is not directly established through the participants’ gaze. Conversely, participants are represented as objects of contemplation or items of information. Contemplation is also attained in most of the pictures featuring natural landscapes where the top-down angle is largely preferred.

Systemic Functional Linguistics, Visual Grammar and Tourist Promotion 57

This type of promotion of the Australian website is, thus, highly interactive and is based on demand when the interaction is achieved through language, and both on offer and demand, when the interaction is facilitated through images. In order to compare how cities are described and advertised in the Australian website, the link to the city of Melbourne has been chosen. Transitivity analysis Processes: material (Pm), mental (Pme), attributive (Pa), identifying (Pi), behavioural (Pb), verbal (Pv), existential (Pe). Participants: Actor (A), Goal (G), Beneficiary (B), Senser (S), Phenomenon (Ph), Carrier (C), Attribute (At), Token (T), Value (V), Behaver (B), Sayer (Sy), Target (T), Existent (E), Verbiage (Vb). Circumstance of location (Cl), of extent (Cx), of manner (Cm), of cause (Cc), of accompaniment (Ca), of matter (Ct), of role (Co). Theme is underlined. Find (Pm) all (G) you (S) need to know (Pme) about Melbourne (Ph) in Australia (Cl), the capital of Victoria and a vibrant hub of style, sport, culture and dining (At). Discover (Pm) Melbourne's secret laneways and rooftops, the cultural hub of Federation Square, buzzing bars, boutiques and eateries, and the iconic MCG (G). Experience (Pme) St Kilda, the Royal Botanic Gardens, bohemian Brunswick Street and the nation-stopping excitement of the Spring Racing Carnival (Ph). Join (Pm) world class events such as the Australian Grand Prix (G). Day trip (Pm) to the Mornington Peninsula or to Phillip Island for fairy penguins (Cl). WHAT YOU (B) CAN SEE (Pm) IN MELBOURNE (Cl) Discover (Pm) Melbourne's wide streets and hidden laneways, galleries and parklands, eclectic precincts and a dynamic food and wine scene (G). YOUR FIRST STEPS IN MELBOURNE Get (Pm) your bearings (G) for your arrival (Cc) in Melbourne (Cl). Arriving (Pm) by air (Cm) Tullamarine Airport (MEL) - 25 minutes to the city (Cl) by car (Cm), around 20 minutes to the city (Cl) by shuttle bus (Cm) Arriving (Pm) by sea (Cm) Station Pier, Port Melbourne - 15-20 minutes to the city (Cl) by car (Cm) OWSP = Outer West Station Pier OESP = Outer East Station Pier IWSP = Inner West Station Pier

58

Chapter One WHAT YOU (B) CAN SEE (Pm) NEAR MELBOURNE (Cl) Find (Pm) the Great Ocean Road, Wineries, National Parks and coastal wilderness (G). MAKE (Pm) YOUR TRIP (G) HAPPEN (Pm) Find (Pm) accommodation, attractions, tours, events and restaurants (G) to help (Pm) you (G) plan (Pm) your trip (G). INFORMATION TO HELP (Pm) YOU (G) PLAN (Pm) YOUR TRIP (G) VISA INFORMATION Find out (Pm) what you (S) need to know (Pme) about entry (Ph) to Australia (Cl). AUSSIE SPECIALIST Find (Pm) a travel specialist (G) near you (Cl). MORE INFORMATION ON VICTORIA Visit (Pm) the Tourism Victoria website (G).

The text has 253 running words, and is, therefore, smaller than both the Italian and English texts. In contrast to the other two descriptions it shows a high level of text-image interaction. In this description, images do not only complement the textual description but are a fundamental system towards the full comprehension of the text. The description of the city of Melbourne makes a predominant use of Material Processes (21 out of 24 total processes), and only a limited use of Mental processes (3 occurrences). Unexpectedly, there are no Attributive Processes and the only Attribute identified in the text depends on a clause which is elliptical of the verb. What is interesting is that the Actor of all the 19 Material Processes is always the reader and never the city of Melbourne and its features. The same happens with Mental and Behavioural Processes where the two identified Sensers and Behavers are represented by the reader. As for Circumstances, the most used are the Circumstances of Location (10 occurrences out of a total of 16 Circumstances), and the Circumstances of Manner (5 occurrences). Only one Circumstance of Cause has been identified. As for Theme and Rheme, out of a total of 18 Themes, only 2 of them are marked, that is to say the two Identifying themes. Marked Themes are, in almost all cases, represented by verbs in the Imperative mood and cohesion is given by the fact that all the Themes refer to the viewer of the description. The analysis proceeds with the identification of the system of Mood.

Systemic Functional Linguistics, Visual Grammar and Tourist Promotion 59

Mood analysis Subject (S), Finite (F), negative (Fn), modalised (Fms), modulated (Fml). Predicator (P), modulated Predicator (Pml), modalised Predicator (Pms), fused Finite and Predicator (F/P). Complement (C), attributive Complement (Ca), Adjunct (A), circumstantial (Ac), mood (Am), comment (Ao), polarity (Ap), vocative (Av), conjunctive (Aj), continuity (At). Find (P) all (C) you (A) need to (Fml) know (P) about Melbourne (C) in Australia (Ac), the capital of Victoria and a vibrant hub of style, sport, culture and dining (Ca). Discover (P) Melbourne's secret laneways and rooftops, the cultural hub of Federation Square, buzzing bars, boutiques and eateries, and the iconic MCG (C). Experience (P) St Kilda, the Royal Botanic Gardens, bohemian Brunswick Street and the nation-stopping excitement of the Spring Racing Carnival (C). Join (P) world class events such as the Australian Grand Prix (C). Day trip (P) to the Mornington Peninsula or to Phillip Island for fairy penguins (Ac). WHAT (C) YOU (S) CAN (Fms) SEE (P) IN MELBOURNE (Ac) Discover (P) Melbourne's wide streets and hidden laneways, galleries and parklands, eclectic precincts and a dynamic food and wine scene (C). YOUR FIRST STEPS IN MELBOURNE Get (P) your bearings (C) for your arrival in Melbourne (Ac). Arriving (S) by air (Ac) Tullamarine Airport (MEL) - 25 minutes to the city by car, around 20 minutes to the city by shuttle bus Arriving (S) by sea (Ac) Station Pier, Port Melbourne - 15- 20 minutes to the city by car OWSP = Outer West Station Pier OESP = Outer East Station Pier IWSP = Inner West Station Pier WHAT (C) YOU (S) CAN (Fms) SEE (P) NEAR MELBOURNE (Ac) Find (P) the Great Ocean Road, Wineries, National Parks and coastal wilderness (C). MAKE (F) YOUR TRIP (C) HAPPEN (P) Find (P) accommodation, attractions, tours, events and restaurants (C) to help (F) you (C) plan (P) your trip (C).

60

Chapter One INFORMATION TO HELP (F) YOU (C) PLAN (P) YOUR TRIP (C) VISA INFORMATION Find out (P) what (C) you (S) need to (Fml) know (P) about entry (C) to Australia (Ac). AUSSIE SPECIALIST Find (P) a travel specialist (C) near you (Ac). MORE INFORMATION ON VICTORIA Visit (P) the Tourism Victoria website (C).

This text consists of 19 sentences: 13 of them are in the Imperative mood and are almost always comprised of the Residue. The other 6 sentences are 4 declaratives and 2 infinitives. The 4 declaratives are interesting because their aim is not to describe the city of Melbourne but rather to convey a meaning of obligation with the modulated Finite ‘need to’ and a meaning of probability (tending towards certainty) expressed by the modalised Finite ‘can’. The text is highly interactive, much more interactive than the English one where declaratives and Imperatives alternate. The exchange of goods and services is, therefore, created through the system of demand where viewers are constantly required to act. In the following section the three analyses carried out will be compared and contrasted in order to give a general idea of the different strategies adopted by the three websites (and the three cultures) in advertising their country and attracting inbound tourism.

1.4 Comparing results The interpretation of language as well as the interpretation of images is strictly dependent on the cultural context where they are produced and developed and, for this reason, they can be decoded only if they are filtered through the intrinsic features and set of values specific for each society. As Kress and van Leeuwen explain (2006, p. 35), the place of visual communication in a given society can only be understood in the context of both the range of forms and modes available in that society and in the context of their uses and valuation, that is to say in the context of their semiotic landscape, which obviously varies across cultures but also across years. Before summing up the results achieved in the three analyses, it should be pointed out that the conclusions outlined in this chapter aim to provide readers more with general insights rather than with prescriptive rules.

Systemic Functional Linguistics, Visual Grammar and Tourist Promotion 61

Indeed, more data and more systematic analyses would be needed to define tendencies and behaviours in a clearer and more objective way. However, differences are so marked that a contrastive summing up of results would surely prove insightful for those interested in communication and marketing strategies across cultures. In terms of homepage analysis, the two extremes are represented by the Italian and Australian websites. The Italian homepage is characterised by the predominant presence of declaratives which activate the system of giving information with a reduced interactivity. This tendency can also be identified in the pictures selected, which are mainly Conceptual Symbolic Suggestive pictures. Participants of images are, in most cases, churches, ancient palaces and buildings, and old towns which are depicted as relevant, being foregrounded, central, and real, due to details and colour contrasts. Natural landscapes are also depicted but less frequently. As for human participants, their presence is very limited and when they are visible they are optional elements in the background, very small in size, and basically used as models of ‘ideal tourism’. The Australian website may be defined as the essence of interactivity and of visual meanings. Most of the advertising is left to the communicative power of images, which are large and captivating. Verbal descriptions are reduced to captions and to a couple of questions directly addressed to viewers. Action is required in the choice of their ideal Australian holiday. Human and animal participants are present in more than half of all the pictures on the homepage. They are depicted as busy in their holiday activities or directly interacting with the viewers, inviting them to be part of their world. Top-down angles are very frequent and although suggesting a god-like point of view they invite contemplation and willingness to experience this world. What the website mainly achieves is, thus, the function of demand. The British website shows a balanced alternation of demand and offer, and both information and services and goods are exchanged through verbal and visual communication. Verbal communication is mainly realised through Imperative forms which create interactivity, although the presence of declaratives can also be noticed. Natural landscapes are the preferred participants in the pictures selected for the homepage with a predominance of the top-down angle, the angle of maximum power. Human or animal participants are not featured, and for this reason it can be assumed that the British website demonstrates the function of demand when language is used and of offer when communication is established through images.

62

Chapter One

The analysis of verbal descriptions through the SFL framework has also provided interesting results. A table may help us interpret these results contrastively (Table 1.7): TABLE 1.7. Summary of the results of the three analyses

Running words Transitivity analysis

ThemeRheme analysis Mood analysis

Material pr. Attributive pr. Verbal Mental Behavioural Identifying Existential Total number of Themes Unmarked Marked Finite Finite/Predicator Finite modalised Finite modulated Predicator Declaratives Interrogatives Imperatives

Naples 339 20 11 1 0 0 4 0 18

Belfast 425 28 4 0 4 0 1 3 34

Melbourne 253 23 0 0 3 0 0 0 18

12 6 9 16 0 1 12 28 0 0

25 9 13 8 1 0 25 20 0 16

16 2 3 0 2 2 19 3 0 12

The Transitivity analysis has revealed a predominant use of Material processes in all the descriptions analysed. However, differences can be found in the Actors of these processes. While in the Italian text, the Actor is almost always represented by the city of Naples, in the other two texts the Actors are mainly represented by potential visitors. Attributive processes tend to be much more preferred in the Italian whereas Mental processes show up only in the British and Australian texts, although with limited frequency. As for the Theme-Rheme analysis, the British text seems to be the one with a higher number of Themes and consequently with a higher number of sentences. Themes are unmarked in all texts and markedness is limited to 33% in the Italian text, 26% in the English text, and 11% in the Australian text. The preference for unmarkedness can be interpreted as a preference for easily-accessible and more reader-friendly texts, where the actual message reaches readers directly without interferences.

Systemic Functional Linguistics, Visual Grammar and Tourist Promotion 63

The Mood analysis confirms what has already been noticed in the analysis of the three homepages. The Italian text adopts a declarative style, where no interrogatives and no Imperatives are present. The function is, here again, that of an offer of information. The British text has about the same number of declaratives and of Imperatives and shows an alternation between offering of information and demanding action. The text is, thus, more interactive than the Italian one. The Australian text shows a predominant use of Imperative forms and is structured in a way that continuously requires action on the part of the web user. It is thus highly interactive. Implications for this analysis are several: based on the assumption that language, images and culture are strictly interrelated, every act of crosscultural communication (from the translation of a tourist product to the development of promotional tourist products for international audiences) should not disregard this aspect and thus should carefully select the strategies to be adopted for a successful result. In the following chapters, the three websites will be the object of further analyses based on the Corpus Linguistics approach and on the Intercultural Studies approach. The main aim of chapter two is to detect every aspect of the persuasive type of communication adopted by the three websites, from the most frequent collocations and expressions to the wording of similar cultural concepts.

CHAPTER TWO THE AIDA MODEL, CORPUS LINGUISTICS AND TOURIST PROMOTION

This chapter will focus on the identification of linguistic patterns and regularities in tourist promotion and will discuss how language is used in the creation of persuasive texts. In order to do this, the AIDA model and the methodological approach of Corpus Linguistics will be adopted and applied. As anticipated in chapter one, persuasion can be defined as all linguistic behaviour that attempts to either change the thinking or behaviour of an audience or strengthen its belief (Virtanen and Halmari 2005, p. 3). In tourist websites, when persuasive strategies are wellmanaged and successfully employed, tourists and visitors change their behaviour by choosing the travel destination advertised. To reach this final aim, the advertisement of a destination should attract the potential tourists’ attention, stimulate their interest, make the product desirable to them and convince them to take action to have it or purchase it. These points constitute the AIDA model (Lewis, 1899; Strong, 1925), a model of communication commonly used in the marketing domain, named after an acronym which stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. The AIDA model was originally developed to interpret and understand personal selling but later applied to marketing and advertising. The four steps which constitute this model can be considered a linear sequence of effects (Fennis and Stroebe 2015, p. 32-33): advertising influences consumers’ behaviour through the sequence of Attention (which corresponds to the cognitive stage and to the stage where brand awareness is created), Interest (where persuasion starts to be activated), Desire (or affective stage where persuasion is activated and accomplished), and Action (which corresponds to the behavioural stage). The model, therefore, reflects two basic functions of advertising, ‘to inform’ and ‘to persuade’. The model is hierarchical in that each step prepares the consumer for the following step until the final objective, the purchase of the product or

The AIDA Model, Corpus Linguistics and Tourist Promotion

65

service, is achieved (ibid.): if consumers have never seen the brand before, advertising must attract the consumers’ attention to develop brand awareness. Similarly, if consumers know the brand but not its attributes, they must be ‘educated’ by advertisements which should arouse their interest and stimulate their desire. All this will lead to action on the part of the consumer. This model has also been applied to tourism discourse whose promotional aim is achieved by a strategic combination of information and persuasion. However, most of the literature concerning the AIDA model applied to tourist promotion focuses mainly on the different elements and devices that should be combined to reach the four objectives, such as elaborating an outreach and a content strategy, deciding what makes a product desirable and what emotional connections should be created, and how and with what means customers can be called to action. To my knowledge, apart from a study carried out by Young Ok (2003), precise grammatical, lexical, and syntactic aspects corresponding to the realisation of the four steps have never been isolated systematically. For example, Attention and Interest are usually established by focusing on the uniqueness, status or timely significance of a destination (Ritchie 1984, p. 2): an analysis which aims to identify and isolate the most common linguistic features used in these steps should focus on adjectives and nouns which refer to the popularity of the destination, and on linguistic items referring to its history and tradition. In terms of language, Desire can be created, for example, by using adjectives and nouns referring to the beauty of the destination, items and descriptions referring to relaxation or adventure, and items describing the suitability of what is offered, including activities, for specific groups of travellers (for example, children, nature lovers, …). The reason why these linguistic features are considered peculiar to this step depends strictly on motivational Desires which may vary according to both individual and socio-cultural features. With the risk of over simplifying of a complex process, two types of motives can be identified at the basis of leisure travel, that is to say ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors (Dann, 1977; Crompton, 1979). Push factors are intrinsic motivators such as the desire for escape, relaxation, health, adventure, social interaction and so on (Hsu and Huang 2008, p. 18) whereas pull factors depend on the attractiveness of the destinations, such as beaches, activities, recreational facilities (for children, for example) and cultural attractions. All these factors together should ultimately induce Action on the part of the potential tourist, and for this reason all the expressions including the linguistic items mentioned above are examples of covert encouragement to

66

Chapter Two

take action. However, some more overt invitation to act could be identified in the use of Imperative forms or in expressions where advice is given. The analysis proposed in this chapter aims to identify, describe, and compare the promotional language used by Italian, British and Australian cultures in order to advertise and promote their respective countries as holiday destinations. In order to do that, the linguistic content of the websites www.visitbritain.co.uk, www.italia.it, www.australia.com, which promote tourism in Great Britain, Italy and Australia, has been downloaded and three comparable corpora have been assembled. Three types of analyses will be carried out using these corpora in this chapter and in chapter three: first, an analysis of frequencies which will consider the wordlists of the three corpora, the content words contained in the wordlists and the semantic categories which occur more frequently in each corpus; results will be interpreted according to the four steps of the AIDA model in order to describe how persuasion is linguistically expressed in the three websites and what kind of concepts and descriptions are preferred and are more relevant in the promotion of the three countries. In chapter three, a concordance analysis of some of the most frequent words in the three corpora will be presented, in order to further describe in detail the role played by nouns, adjectives and verbs as elements to motivate Attention, Interest, Desire and Action and generalise on differences and similarities across the three cultures. Finally, the way modality is used in the three corpora will be investigated and described. However, before moving to the above-mentioned corpus analyses, sections 2.1 and 2.2 will provide a brief overview of the Corpus Linguistics approach to language investigation.

2.1 Corpus linguistics and the analysis of language Corpus linguistics can be defined as a method of linguistic investigation or, as Tognini Bonelli suggests (2001, p. 1), a pre-application methodology because, unlike other applications that accept certain facts as given, Corpus Linguistics defines its own sets of rules before they are applied. At the basis of the Corpus Linguistics approach there is the assumption that the focus of analysis should not be the study of what is theoretically possible in language but rather the study of actual language used in naturally occurring texts (Biber et al. 1998, p. 1). For this reason, corpus linguistics approaches the analysis of authentic language through corpora, that is to say through large and principled collections of natural texts, sampled to be representative of a language variety, stored in

The AIDA Model, Corpus Linguistics and Tourist Promotion

67

electronic format, easily accessible by means of a computer and analysable with the help of linguistic analysis software. In order to better understand Corpus Linguistics and the kind of analyses that can be carried out using this approach, the essential characteristics of corpus-based analysis, as indicated by Biber et al. (1998, p. 4), are adapted and commented on below: 1. it is empirical, analysing the actual patterns of use in natural texts; 2. it utilises a large and principled collection of natural texts, known as a ‘corpus’, as the basis for analysis; 3. it makes extensive use of computers for analysis, using both automatic and interactive techniques; 4. it depends on both quantitative and qualitative analytical techniques. The first of these characteristics emphasizes language use, that is to say how speakers and writers exploit the resources of their language in actual contexts of usage. Corpus analysis, thus, investigates language as effectively used and not as theoretically possible. Corpus linguists refer to ‘natural texts’ to emphasize the need to analyse authentic data. As Sinclair (1991, p. 4) suggests, “however plausible an invented example might be, it cannot be offered as a genuine instance of language in use”. For this reason, one of the external criteria at the basis of corpus compilation is authenticity. Linguistic analyses are usually carried out by means of specialised computer software. The results that we obtain from corpus analysis can confirm our hypotheses or intuitions about language or can be surprising and unexpected. In the first case, the approach will be defined as ‘corpusbased’, that is to say when the corpus is mainly used to expound, test or exemplify theories and descriptions already formulated (Tognini Bonelli 2001, p. 65). In the second case, the approach will be defined ‘corpusdriven’, that is to say the analysis will be driven by the evidence provided by data (ibid., p. 84). The fourth of the characteristics listed above points to the importance of considering corpus analyses not only as simple counts of linguistic features nor as qualitative interpretations based on intuitions. These two features should always be combined together in corpus analysis because data would be useless without a qualitative, functional interpretation, and statements about the systems would be weak and inconsistent if not quantified.

68

Chapter Two

Corpus analysis allows the linguist to uncover many regularities of language which otherwise would be inaccessible. In particular, a corpus approach allows the researcher to identify and analyse complex association patterns, that is to say the systematic ways in which linguistic features are associated with other linguistic and non-linguistic features (Biber et al. 1998, p. 5). Linguistic associations may be lexical, grammatical, and lexicogrammatical. Non-linguistic associations refer to the association between a linguistic item and registers, dialects or periods of time (ibid., p. 7). Most of these relationships will be analysed and exemplified in the following sections when the analyses of the three corpora, obtained by downloading the texts from the websites www.visitbritain.co.uk, www.italia.it, and www.australia.com, will be presented. In the following sections, a brief overview of the different types of corpora available for linguistic analysis will be provided.

2.2 Corpora and methods There are several types of corpora, depending on the aim for which they are created. When a corpus is assembled, decisions should be made about size, priorities of selection, representativeness of language included, and sampling criteria. All texts should obviously represent language used in authentic language events. The corpora used in this chapter are ‘specialized’ corpora because they are composed of texts of a particular type (websites), are domain or genrespecific and only represent the language of tourism used to advertise a destination. These corpora can also be defined as ‘comparable’, that is to say they follow a similar composition pattern in that they all collect original texts included in the three official websites for the tourist promotion of Italy, Britain and Australia. Similar composition means that all the texts contained in the corpus have the same communicative function, they all deal with the same topic, and are all similar text types. The texts contained in a comparable corpus are all original texts and no translations are included. A comparable corpus allows the linguist to compare different languages or varieties in similar circumstances of communication, but avoiding the inevitable distortion introduced by the translations of a parallel corpus (EAGLES 1996)1.

1

http://www.ilc.cnr.it/EAGLES96/corpustyp/node21.html#SECTION000110000 000000000000 (last accessed January 2015)

The AIDA Model, Corpus Linguistics and Tourist Promotion

69

Conversely, in chapter four of this book three parallel corpora will be analysed: 1. the Italian-British English corpus (VisIt_T), comprised of the original Italian texts published on the website italia.it and their translations into English; 2. the British English-Italian corpus (VisBrit_T), composed of original English texts published on the website www.visitbritain.co.uk and their translations into Italian; and 3. the Australian English-Italian corpus (VisAus_T), made up of original texts in Australian English published on the website www.australia.com and their translations into Italian. Parallel corpora allow the linguist to gain insights into the process of translation and into the strategies adopted by translators. For this reason, they cannot be used to generalise about the language as a whole. Gries (2009, p. 2) maintains that corpus linguistics analyses are always based on the evaluation of some kind of frequencies. These frequencies can refer to the occurrence of linguistic elements, for example how often morphemes, words, grammatical patterns, etc. occur in a corpus, and to the characteristics co-occurring with these elements, that is to say how often morphemes occur with particular words, how often particular words are co-selected in a certain grammatical construction. The first type of these frequencies refers to frequency lists such as wordlists, which will be discussed in the following sections of this chapter, or to keyword lists; the second type of these frequencies is illustrated in concordances which will be described and exemplified in chapter three. Statistical methods undoubtedly play an important role in corpus analysis, but clearly, it is not corpora that interpret data. That is the task of the linguist who has to combine, as objectively as possible, quantitative and qualitative analyses. Corpus software programs allow the linguist to quantify linguistic phenomena and display data so that the researcher can investigate linguistic patterns (Mahlberg 2010, p. 292), that is to say repetitions of linguistic events, which are a crucial feature in corpus linguistics. For clarity’s sake, the three corpora have been named using three acronyms which will be used in the rest of this chapter: the corpus of texts downloaded from the website www.visitbritain.co.uk will be hence referred to as ‘VisBrit’; similarly, the corpus of texts from the website www.italia.it will be referred to with the acronym ‘VisIt’, and the corpus of texts from the website www.australia.com is the ‘VisAus’ corpus.

70

Chapter Two

2.3 Frequencies in the VisBrit corpus The three corpora, VisBrit, VisIt and VisAus, will be analysed with the help of a specific software package for linguistic analysis, WordSmith Tools 6.0 (Scott, 2012). In particular, the three corpora will be analysed by means of two of the different tools available in the package: WordList and Concordance. The WordList tool of Wordsmith 6.0 has several windows, each one displaying useful statistical information. In the first box, words are listed in frequency order while in the second box the list is alphabetical. In the third box, several types of statistical information are provided, such as the total number of words contained in the files uploaded for analysis, called tokens, and the number of word types, that is to say the total number of words without counting words that are repeated. The VisBrit corpus has 86,112 running words and 8,842 types. These statistical measures are important as they provide indications of the linguistic complexity of a corpus which can be measured through the standardised type/token ratio (STTR), that is to say through the relationship between the number of types and the number of tokens. The higher the percentage of the STTR, the more varied the vocabulary. The STTR of the VisBrit corpus is 45.28 and this means that its vocabulary is not highly varied. This may be due to the specialized nature of the files included in the corpus which deals with the promotion of tourist attractions and destinations in Great Britain or with the low level of formality of such texts. This figure may be better interpreted if compared with the STTR of the British National Corpus (BNC) spoken and written sections. The spoken section of the BNC has a low STTR, 32.48, which is typical of spoken texts. The written component of the BNC has a high STTR, namely 57.81. For this reason we may assume that the VisBrit corpus presents some features which are halfway between a spoken genre and a written genre. The first ten/fifteen most frequent words of a corpus are usually function words, such as determiners, conjunctions, prepositions and pronouns (see Figure 2.1).

The AIDA Model, Corpus Linguistics and Tourist Promotion

71

FIGURE 2.1. Example of a wordlist generated by Wordsmith

However, in order to make the comparison of the three corpora easier, the analysis proposed here will focus only on content words, that is to say on nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Table 2.1 shows the first 40 most frequent words of the VisBrit corpus: TABLE 2.1. List of the first 40 content words in the VisBrit Word 1.Britain 4.home 7.find 10.castle 13.top 16.national 19.day 22.attractions 25.explore 28.music 31.heritage 34.beautiful 37.gardens 40.beach

% 0.39 0.30 0.29 0.26 0.22 0.20 0.18 0.17 0.16 0.15 0.15 0.14 0.13 0.13

Word 2.park 5.great 8.London 11.England 14.take 17.best 20.museum 23.Wales 26.Scotland 29.centre 32.shopping 35.get 38.UK

% 0.33 0.30 0.28 0.23 0.21 0.19 0.17 0.17 0.16 0.15 0.15 0.14 0.13

Word 3.city 6.world 9.see 12.family 15.visit 18.history 21.place 24.house 27.famous 30.royal 33.country 36.British 39.food

% 0.31 0.30 0.27 0.22 0.20 0.18 0.17 0.16 0.16 0.15 0.14 0.13 0.13

72

Chapter Two

This wordlist gives us a general idea of what words and concepts are mostly focused on and emphasized in the promotion of Great Britain and what conceptual strategies of persuasion are preferred. In order to have a clear picture of the type of language selected, these 40 items have been grouped into three broad categories: nouns, adjectives, and verbs2. The most frequent nouns mainly refer to Great Britain’s heritage and culture (‘castle’, ‘history’, ‘museum’, ‘attractions’, …) and less frequently to its environment (‘park’, ‘gardens’, ‘beach’). However, a closer look at their usage is needed to establish whether the expressions in which they occur are components of Attention and Interest or of Desire, as we will see later. The most frequent adjectives seem to be mainly used to describe the uniqueness of the place, or of its features, and its status (such as ‘great’, ‘top’, ‘national’, ‘best’, ‘famous’, ‘royal’) apart from ‘beautiful’ and ‘family’ which could be interpreted as a device to enhance desirability. The most frequent verbs, that is to say ‘find’, ‘see’, ‘take’, ‘visit’, and ‘explore’, clearly invite readers to take action as confirmed by a look at their clusters which reveal their frequent usage in the Imperative form or in expressions giving suggestions and advice, and for this reason they are a clear linguistic device of the fourth step, Action. However, to have a better idea of the features of the promotion and the strategies of persuasion used in this website, the clusters of some of the most frequent items will be analysed. The tool Cluster generates a frequency list for groups of words related to the word selected. Clusters can be considered as frequencies beyond single words and allow the linguist to uncover the ways single words are used. In the examples provided in Figures 2.2 and 2.3 the length of the clusters of ‘city’ and ‘park’ has been set to five and to four.

FIGURE 2.2. Five-word cluster of ‘city’

2

In the case of words with more than one grammatical function (for example, noun and adjective) instances have been counted separately on the basis of the grammatical role performed.

The AIDA Model, Corpus Linguistics and Tourist Promotion

73

FIGURE 2.3. Four-word cluster of ‘park’

An examination of the clusters of ‘city’, ‘park’, ‘great’ and ‘see’ reveals some of the most common patterns in which they occur. For example, what is ‘in the heart of the city’ and what ‘the city is home to’ are important elements in the description of cities in the British website. Interestingly, the four-word cluster of the noun ‘park’ again features the cluster ‘is home to’, and confirms that this is a frequent expression used for the description of places and attractions and an expression which can be used to represent linguistically the steps Attention and Interest. The four-word cluster of the adjective ‘great’, reported in Figure 2.4, allows us to identify what is ‘great’ in the VisBrit corpus, that is to say ‘offers’, ‘place’, ‘day out’, ‘family day out’, ‘way’. The expressions in which ‘great’ is more frequently used seem to suggest that this adjective may be considered as an element which contributes to the fulfilment of Desire.

FIGURE 2.4. Four-word cluster of ‘great’

74

Chapter Two

FIGURE 2.5. Four-word cluster of ‘see’

The four-word cluster for ‘see’ (Figure 2.5) suggests that this verb is mainly used as a device to describe the desirability of a place and is an invitation to take action, in that it is used in expressions such as ‘(things) to see and do’, ‘(top) 5 things to see’, ‘where you can see’, ‘and much to see’, ‘is a must see’, ‘a lot to see’, ‘see some of the’. Considering the top 40 words in the list and the clusters analysed, it may be assumed that the website www.visitbritain.co.uk persuades potential tourists to visit Great Britain by focusing on attractions such as parks, cities, castles, and museums to see, visit and explore with the whole family, and by promising great days and great offers. Furthermore, potential tourists are encouraged to believe that what is described is desirable and a ‘must see’ thanks to the high frequency of evaluating items and expressions such as ‘one of the world’s + superlatives’, ‘worldfamous’, ‘world-class’, ‘Britain’s best + noun’, ‘the best + noun’, ‘the most famous + noun’, which describe its uniqueness and status. However, at this stage of the analysis, it is too early to jump to conclusions and further analyses are needed to better define how the four steps of the model are developed. For this reason, the content words among the first 413 words of the VisBrit wordlist have been considered, that is to say only those content words with a percentage of frequency not lower than 0.04%3 (corresponding to 30 instances). These words have

3

The threshold has been set at 0.04% because a look at the concordance of the words occurring with a percentage lower than 0.04% reveals that no interesting recurring patterns of usage are present for those words. The same percentage has been set as a threshold for the analysis of the wordlists of the other two corpora under examination.

The AIDA Model, Corpus Linguistics and Tourist Promotion

75

been grouped according to their grammatical category, more precisely that of nouns, verbs, or adjectives. In this way, the key concepts upon which the promotion of Great Britain is based and the linguistic devices used to implement the four steps may appear more clearly.

2.3.1 Frequent nouns in the VisBrit Considering all the nouns that occur among the first 413 words in the VisBrit, nine frequent semantic domains can be identified. These semantic fields have been labelled as follows: Culture and Heritage, Environment, Cities and Towns, Activities, Time, People, Accommodation, Food and Restaurants, General Location (Table 2.2). TABLE 2.2. Semantic fields of nouns and their frequency in the VisBrit Semantic fields (nouns) 1. Culture and Heritage 2. Environment 3. Cities and Towns 4. Activities 5. Time 6. People 7. Accommodation 8. Food and Restaurants 9. General Location

Acronym CH E CT A T P Ac FR GL

% 1.7 1.24 1.07 0.6 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.3

A brief explanation of the type of nouns included in these semantic fields is needed to better understand the results of this analysis. The semantic field of Culture and Heritage (CH) groups together nouns referring to events, festivals, monuments, museums, heritage and architecture. The semantic field of Environment (E), as the label suggests, consists of nouns such as ‘park’, ‘gardens’, ‘beach’, ‘coast’, ‘countryside’, and so on. All the nouns referring to cities, villages, towns, districts, houses, streets and so on are contained in the semantic field of Cities and Towns (CT). The semantic field of Activities (A) includes nouns such as ‘zoo’, ‘picnic’, ‘sports’, ‘spa’, ‘shopping’ and so on. The semantic field of Time (T) groups together nouns referring to time, such as ‘day’, ‘year’, ‘century’, etc.

Chapter Two

76

The semantic field of People (P) contains nouns such as ‘family’, ‘children’, ‘queen’, ‘people’, ‘adults’, etc. Words such as ‘accommodation’, ‘hotel’, ‘hostel’ belong to the semantic field of Accommodation (Ac), while ‘food’, ‘drink’ and ‘restaurants’ are contained in the semantic field of Food and Restaurant (FR). General Location (GL) groups together general nouns which are usually used to describe locations, such as ‘places’, ‘areas’, ‘part’, ‘spot’, etc. The results of this frequency analysis suggest that the focus of promotion is based on places and attractions such as castles, museums, parks, gardens, festivals and their history. A minor focus is placed on food and on places offering accommodation. The items belonging to the semantic fields listed above are used, with different frequencies, in expressions which more or less represent all the steps of the model. In fact, the expressions in which the nouns described above are embedded show the diversity and abundance of attractions in Great Britain describing them as unique, popular, and historic, they also describe the attractiveness and suitability of what is offered, and they directly invite readers to enjoy them. The following expressions are examples of the Attention and Interest stages: -

It’s the second largest inhabited castle in England … (CH) Lincoln Cathedral is one of Britain’s finest medieval buildings … (CH) Cambridge’s heritage also includes an outstanding record of scientific … (CH) This little-known Welsh beach has been described as the best-kept secret … (E) There are acres of parkland and gardens … (E) Britain’s university cities are famous for their historic architecture … (CT) Aberdeenshire is home to over 50 golf courses … (A) The spa offers a 20-metre swimming pool … (A) A 40-minute walk along the South Bank will take you … (A) With foundations dating back to the 13th century, … (T) For over 30 years, Banham has been watching over wildlife … (T) Today, the Queen is not only Head of State … (P) There are many types of holiday accommodation in the UK … (Ac) Hotels in Britain come in all shapes and sizes … (Ac) Price includes food, accommodation, equipment, … (FR) Liverpool One is the heart of Liverpool’s shopping … (GL) The farm is set right in the heart of the mountains … (GL)

The AIDA Model, Corpus Linguistics and Tourist Promotion

77

The same nouns are used in the following expressions as components of the Desire step: -

The beautiful ruins of St Andrews Castle and Cathedral are well worth a visit. (CH) … there’s a castle for you whatever your particular interest … (CH) … they are part of a bigger heritage you can explore… (CH) There’s a fantastic family beach, 2 children’s playgrounds … (P+E) This small, clean and quiet beach has sand dunes … (E) you and your family can make the best of your day at this beautiful beach … (E) … amongst the most beautiful gardens in the world … (E) You’ll find lots of fascinating castles, houses and gardens to visit … (E) Scotland boasts vibrant and exciting cities … (CT) You’ll find a diverse and exciting range of shops … (A) … not to mention a water park and even a spa for the adults … (A+P) Cultural events take place all year … (T) You really can be a king or a queen at your own castle when you stay at … (P) Campus accommodation is an excellent way to discover a local area. (Ac) Each hotel has a unique setting … (Ac) … food you won’t find anywhere else … (FR) The vibrant indoor market set in the heart of Cardiff … (GL)

In the following expressions, nouns are contained in expressions belonging to the Action step: -

Live like royalty for a night, stay at a castle … (CH) Marvel at Chester Cathedral … (CH) Choose between culture, heritage, or straight-up fun! (CH) Relax on 7 miles of sandy beach … (E) Discover 40 acres of gorgeous gardens … (E) See some of the most exciting cities in the world … (CT) Treat yourself at the tranquil spa by Kasia … (A) Explore 2000 years of history in 90 minutes. (T) Live like a King (or Queen)! (P) Find accommodation in Windsor quickly and easily … (Ac) Find the perfect Dorset hotel or guesthouse … (Ac) Sample the best local food and drink … (FR) Visit the stunning heart of Neolithic Orkney … (GL)

78

Chapter Two

2.3.2 Frequent verbs in the VisBrit Apart from the verbs ‘to be’ and ‘to have’ which are the most frequent, the group of verbs with the highest frequency of occurrence in the VisBrit (0.9%) is the one referring to visiting and experiencing, that is to say ‘see’, ‘visit’, ‘explore’, ‘discover’, ‘experience’, ‘try’, ‘tour’, and ‘travel’. Some instances of ‘take’ could be added to this group as they are part of expressions such as ‘take a (guided) tour’ and ‘take a trip’ and also many instances of ‘do’ as it is used several times together with ‘see’ in expressions such as ‘to see and do’ or ‘things to do’ with a meaning similar to the verbs in the ‘visiting and experiencing’ group. Another frequent group is made up of the verbs ‘offer’ and ‘provide’ with a percentage of occurrence of 0.17% in the whole corpus. These verbs are predominantly used in the Present tense or in the –ing form and instead of behaving as an invitation to Action, as the verbs listed above, they are mainly used to describe the places advertised and the services offered. Verbs play a very important role in tourist discourse because they actively contribute to the persuasive function which characterises, in a more or less overt way, all tourist texts. As seen in chapter one, verbs can be instructional or can be used to give advice on the activities and behaviours that tourists should engage in. There are some frequent verbs, in the list of the VisBrit, that can be grouped together not on the basis of their meaning but rather according to the function they have in context and to the way they are used (also in terms of syntactic structures): for example, ‘miss’ and ‘learn’ are, in almost all the occurrences, used as invitational Imperatives, in expressions such as ‘don’t miss’ and ‘learn more’ or ‘learn (all) about’. They are used to invite potential tourists to choose what is being offered and to convince them it is the right choice. Something similar occurs with the verb ‘know’, in the Imperative form, in the expression ‘get to know’. Conversely, the verbs ‘love’ and ‘find’ are frequently used in the Future tense but the former is used in expressions where certainty is conveyed such as ‘you’ll love …’ or ‘children will love …’, and the latter expresses a promise such as ‘you’ll (also) find’. These expressions seem to be used more to convey Desire rather than being a direct way of prompting Action. The verbs ‘fancy’, ‘want’, and ‘like’ taken together, have a percentage of occurrence of 0.11% and are frequently used in expressions such as ‘if you want/fancy/like …’ or ‘do you want …?’, thus conveying the meaning of an offer, of a proposal, or prompting Action indirectly.

The AIDA Model, Corpus Linguistics and Tourist Promotion

79

Interestingly, verbs referring to eating and relaxing are at the bottom of this list: ‘relax’ occurs with a percentage of 0.05% and other semantically similar verbs such as ‘unwind’ or ‘have a rest’ are very rarely used. This means that Desire in the VisBrit is not expressed by focusing on the concept of relaxation and rest. As for eating, the verb ‘eat’ occurs in only 0.01% of cases and the form ‘eating’ only in 0.02%. It seems that advice and suggestions on what to eat are not central in this type of promotion. This is confirmed by a look at the concordance of ‘try’, ‘enjoy, and ‘taste’ which refer to food only a couple of times.

2.3.3 Frequent adjectives in the VisBrit A central role in the language of tourist promotion is also played by the system of adjectives, which are mainly used to present the beauty, allure and uniqueness of destinations or of attractions. The adjectives identified among the first 413 words of the VisBrit have been grouped into different semantic fields in order to have a clearer idea of the characteristics of the British tourist promotion and of the semantic areas upon which more emphasis is placed. In the groups provided below those nouns which are used in the adjectival function have also been included. The semantic fields of adjectives refer to General Location, Time, Uniqueness and Desirability, Size, Beauty, Popularity, Activity, Culture and Heritage, Environment, and Colour (Table 2.3). TABLE 2.3. Semantic fields of adjectives and their frequency in the VisBrit Semantic fields (adjectives) 1.General Location 2.Time 3.Uniqueness and Desirability 4.Size 5.Beauty 6.Popularity 7.Activity 8.Culture and Heritage 9.Environment 10.Colour

Acronym GL T UD S B Po A CH E C

% 1 0.9 0.9 0.7 0.7 0.65 0.2 0.2 0.12 0.07

General Location adjectives are ‘national’, ‘British’, ‘world’, ‘local’, ‘Scottish’, ‘west’, ‘country’, ‘northern’, ‘north’, ‘south’, and ‘English’ and are used in expressions which illustrate all the steps of the model.

80

Chapter Two

Time adjectives are also frequent and this confirms the tendency to emphasise the timeless significance of the country as a way to attract and, consequently, to stimulate potential tourists’ Attention and Interest. Some of these adjectives refer to a precise historic age such as ‘medieval’, ‘Roman’, ‘Victorian’ or are more general such as ‘royal’ (the most frequent of all), ‘historic’, ‘new’, ‘old’, ‘century’, ‘ancient’, ‘modern’, ‘vintage’, and ‘oldest’. The frequency of Time adjectives is logically connected with the high frequency of nouns belonging to the semantic field of Culture and Heritage such as ‘castles’, ‘museums’, etc., which are, as stated above, those places which occupy a relevant role in the promotion of Great Britain. The third most frequent group of adjectives is composed of adjectives which are not semantically similar but are all used to describe the uniqueness or the desirability of the place and its features being advertised, such as: ‘great’, ‘best’, ‘excellent’, ‘good’, ‘rich’, ‘special’, ‘real’, ‘free’, ‘friendly’, ‘interactive’, ‘independent’, ‘exciting’. Size adjectives refer to size and measurement both in the basic and in the superlative form. They are: ‘high’, ‘largest’, ‘little’, ‘biggest’, ‘big’, long’, ‘small’, ‘short’, ‘full’ and can be used either to create Attention and Interest or Desire. They are rarely used in expressions where Action is communicated. Beauty adjectives have the same frequency as Size adjectives and are: ‘beautiful’, ‘perfect’, ‘spectacular’, ‘unique’, ‘stunning’, ‘fascinating’, ‘fantastic’, ‘magnificent’, ‘finest’, and ‘dramatic’. These adjectives convey the meaning of a highly positive evaluation of what is advertised and are strategically used to create Desire. In some cases, they are also used in expressions where Action is indicated. Another group of frequent adjectives broadly refer to fame and popularity (Popularity adjectives) and are used to describe the status of the destination or of the attractions. They are: ‘top’, ‘famous’, ‘favourite’, ‘popular’, and ‘packed’. These adjectives can be used to represent both the Attention and Interest steps, and the Desire step. The Activity adjectives are ‘shopping’, ‘water’, ‘adventure’, ‘safari’, and ‘picnic’ and are used in instances where Attention, Interest and Desire are represented. They rarely occur in expressions where Action is prompted. Less frequent adjectives are Culture and Heritage adjectives, that is to say ‘music’, ‘heritage’ and ‘art’, Environment adjectives such as ‘natural’, and ‘wild’, and Colour adjectives such as ‘white’ and ‘green’. The following examples aim to give a clearer idea of how the adjectives listed above are used to fulfil the four steps of the model. It

The AIDA Model, Corpus Linguistics and Tourist Promotion

81

should be noted that all the adjectives analysed are more frequently used to achieve the Desire step and slightly less frequently the Attention and Interest steps. They depict the fourth step, Action, more rarely. Here follow some examples for the Attention and Interest steps: -

Quality local produce is available across the county at many farmers markets, … (GL) Once part of a royal hunting forest, Sherwood Forest covers 450 acres … (T) Its rich history spans almost 1,000 years … (UD) All visitors enter the fort via a small bridge into the central tower … (S) The hotel is also close to popular attractions like Portobello road … (Po) … contains walking and cycling trails, adventure play areas, and picnic … (A) Northern Ireland is renowned for its lively music scene… (CH) Britain is also home to over 25 cultural and natural UNESCO World Heritage sites … (E) With a network of nearly 50 miles of ‘green’ lanes designed to give … (C)

These are examples of adjectives used in expressions which illustrate the Desire step: -

This is the place to come if you like pubs with real local character … (GL) A peek inside our favourite royal landmarks … (T) Leicester has a rich and varied selection of culture just waiting to be explored. (UD) The beautiful island of Herm can be explored on foot. (B) It’s extremely popular among visitors and free to watch … (Po) Children will love the adventure park … (A) You’ll never be far away from an unforgettable music experience… (CH) Wilderness Wood is a brilliant natural playground for the whole family. (E) We have some of the most famous green spaces in the world … (C)

The examples which follow describe how adjectives are used to invite readers to Action: -

Get up close and personal with the local wildlife … (GL) If you love history and royal tradition, Windsor is the place to head. (T)

Chapter Two

82 -

Discover the world’s rich and dramatic history at the British Museum … (UD) Don’t miss the beautiful Victorian baths … (B) Sample the city’s live music scene yourself … (CH) Get close to the wonders of the natural world … (E) Explore Britain’s green spaces … (C)

In order to compare and contrast the three types of promotion, a quantitative analysis of the Italian corpus (VisIt) and of the Australian corpus (VisAus) wordlists will also be carried out. The analysis of frequencies in the three corpora may shed some light on possible differences and similarities in terms of concepts used for the tourist promotion of each country and of persuasive strategies.

2.4 Frequencies in the VisIt corpus The corpus of texts downloaded from the website www.italia.it is composed of 163,763 running words (tokens) and 15,800 types. The STTR is 52,38 but, unfortunately, statistical measures of an Italian general reference corpus with which to compare this figure do not seem to exist or to be available. Scrolling down the wordlist, the first content word appears in position no.32 and is the word provincia (province). Table 2.4 provides a list of the first 40 content words of the Italian wordlist. TABLE 2.4. List of the first 40 content words in the VisIt Word 1.provincia (province) 4.san (saint) 7.centro (centre)

% 0.34

10.natura (nature)

0.17

13. arte (art)

0.14

16.palazzo(palace/ building) 19.storico (historic) 22.costa (coast)

0.13

0.24 0.18

0.12 0.11

Word 2.città (city/ies) 5.mare (sea) 8.parco (park) 11.museo (museum) 14.zona (area) 17.castello (castle) 20.tipici (typical/local) 23.prodotti (products)

% 0.32 0.23 0.17 0.16 0.14 0.12 0.12 0.11

Word 3.territorio (territory) 6.terra (land) 9.grande (big/great) 12.storia (history) 15.parte (part) 18.chiesa (church) 21.offre (v. offers) 24.vini (wines)

% 0.27 0.20 0.17 0.14 0.13 0.12 0.11 0.11

The AIDA Model, Corpus Linguistics and Tourist Promotion 25.lago (lake)

0.11

28.(si)trova (v. lays/is set) 31.piazza (square)

0.10

34.patrimonio (heritage) 37. antiche (adj.f.pl. ancient) 40. natural (natural)

0.09

0.09

0.09

26.località (place) 29.piatti (dishes) 32.mondo (world) 35.monte (mountain) 38. cucina (cuisine)

0.11 0.10 0.09 0.09 0.09

27.borghi (villages) 30.luoghi (places) 33.ricca (adj.f rich) 36.antica (adj.f.ancient) 39. paesaggio (view/landscape)

83 0.10 0.10 0.09 0.09 0.09

0.09

Interestingly, 32 out of 40 words are nouns. Adjectives are much fewer and are: grande (big/great), storico (historic), tipici (typical/local), ricca (rich – in the feminine singular declension), antica (ancient – in the feminine singular declension), antiche (ancient – in the feminine plural declension), naturale (natural) and they all seem to describe the uniqueness of the place and to operationalize the Attention and Interest steps. There are only two verbs offre (offers – in the 3rd person singular) and trova, the latter almost always used as a reflexive verb in the form si trova (it lays/ it is set). These verbs do not seem to be used as an invitation to Action but rather to describe what the destinations advertised have to offer and, for this reason, contribute to the cognitive stage. Apart from provincia (province) and territorio (territory), which are used to describe the location of destinations and attractions in administrative terms, the Italian promotion focuses on cities, nature, art, history, local produce and cuisine. A look at the clusters of città (city/cities), mare (sea), grande (great/big), and offre may help us have a clearer idea of how these very frequent words are used to persuade readers. The city’s streets (le vie della città), its historic centre (centro storico della città), which is also defined its heart (nel cuore della città), and the adjective belle (beautiful) in the superlative form are the elements which are mostly emphasised in the description of cities (Figure 2.6). Conversely, the sea (mare) seems to be described more as a setting rather than as a place to visit as suggested by the occurrence of this noun in patterns such as a picco sul mare/a strapiombo sul mare (with a sheer drop to the sea), sul livello del mare (above sea level), in relation to the category of sea lovers (gli amanti del mare) and to the colours of its waters blu intenso del mare (the intense blue of the sea) (Figure 2.7).

84

Chapter Two

FIGURE 2.6. Four-word cluster of città

FIGURE 2.7. Four-word cluster of mare

The four-word clusters in which grande (great) is frequently embedded focus on the ‘great variety’ offered by the destination (una grande varietà di) and on the artistic value of attractions (di grande valore artistico) (Figure 2.8). The most frequent verb offre (offer – 3rd sing. Indicative) seems to prefer patterns in which abstract nouns such as possibilità (possibility/ies), opportunità (opportunity/ies), and the concrete noun visitatori (visitors) are included (Figure 2.9).

FIGURE 2.8. Four-word cluster of grande

The AIDA Model, Corpus Linguistics and Tourist Promotion

85

FIGURE 2.9. Four-word cluster of offre

These four clusters are obviously not enough to make general statements on the features of the Italian promotion but it seems that an important role is played by cities of art and by the presence of the sea; the way potential visitors are addressed seems to be based more on the description of the great varieties of places and attractions rather than on a direct invitation to visit the destinations advertised. A look at Tables 2.1 and 2.4, listing the 40 most frequent words in the VisBrit corpus and in the VisIt corpus, reveals many interesting differences and similarities between the two corpora. Some of these differences are obviously due to geographical and administrative reasons, for example in the cases of mare (sea), costa (coast), lago (lake), monte (mountain), provincia (province), and territorio (territory). Similarly, the very frequent presence of words such as chiesa (church), piazza (square), borghi (villages), and arte (art), the latter frequently occurring in the phrase città d’arte (cities of art), comes as no surprise as they typically represent an important part of the Italian heritage. Conversely, interesting insights into the two types of promotion are given by those nouns whose literal equivalents are not similarly frequent in the VisBrit list. These are nouns such as natura (nature), prodotti (products/produce), vini (wines), and piatti (dishes/meals), verbs such as offre (offers) and (si) trova (lays/is set), and adjectives such as storico (historic), tipici (typical/local), ricca (rich), and antica (ancient). A closer examination of these items may provide a clearer picture of the features of the Italian promotion and of its differences from the British one. The word natura (nature) frequently occurs in clusters such as a (stretto) contatto con la natura (in strict contact with nature), per gli

86

Chapter Two

amanti della natura (for nature lovers), chi ama la natura (those who love nature), una natura incontaminata (an unspoilt nature), la bellezza della natura (the beauty of nature), immersi nella natura (immersed in the nature). It is clear that nature plays a very important role in the promotion of Italy where nature not only refers to the environment but to a positive and unspoilt world to get in contact with (see Manca 2013). It is, therefore, mainly used to enhance the desirability of places. The word prodotti (products/produce) occurs in clusters such as feste/sagre dedicate ai prodotti tipici (festivals dedicated to local products), prodotti della terra (products of the land), i prodotti tipici (local products). The importance of local produce is also emphasised by the frequent use of vini (wines) and piatti (dishes) occurring in clusters such as la produzione di vini (the production of wine), la strada dei vini (the wine tour/route), ottimi/eccellenti/pregiati vini (excellent/fine wines), and piatti a base di pesce/carne (fish/meat meals), piatti tipici (local dishes). The only two verbs which are present in the first 40 words of the VisIt list are offre (offers) and (si) trova (lays/is set) which are used to describe what Italy can offer its visitors and the locations of the Italian destinations and attractions. The Italian promotion is characterised by persuasion through description and not through invitation as in the VisBrit corpus where frequent verbs such as ‘see’, ‘find’, ‘visit’, and ‘explore’ directly address readers inviting them to take action. The promotion of Italy is based on the description of the uniqueness and the desirability of the country with special emphasis on cities of art and historical centres, sea, parks and nature, history and heritage, and last but not least local produce. However, in order to make a detailed comparison with the VisBrit corpus, the analysis will proceed by considering the first 400 words, and more precisely all the content words which have a percentage of frequency not lower than 0.04% (corresponding to 58 occurrences). These words have been grouped first according to their grammatical category, more precisely that of nouns, verbs, and adjectives and then into semantic fields.

2.4.1 Frequent nouns in the VisIt The semantic fields in which the most frequent Italian nouns can be grouped are very similar to those identified in the analysis of the nouns in the VisBrit corpus. Considered in order of frequency, they are: Culture and Heritage, Environment, General Location, Cities and Towns, Food, Administration, Activities, and Time (Table 2.5). The first four semantic fields are equally important in the VisBrit corpus and it may easily be

The AIDA Model, Corpus Linguistics and Tourist Promotion

87

assumed that both websites base their promotion mainly and reasonably on culture and heritage, and on environment. Some interesting differences can be noticed in those semantic fields such as People, Accommodation, Beauty, and Colours which have different frequencies in the two corpora. There is also an interesting mismatch in frequency related to the semantic field of Food which has a percentage of frequency of about 0.9% in the VisIt corpus and of about 0.4% in the VisBrit. The new semantic field appearing in the VisIt corpus is the Administration one, which groups together nouns referring to institutions and administration, such as provincia (province), regione (region) and so on. TABLE 2.5. Semantic fields of nouns in the VisBrit and in the VisIt Semantic field (nouns) VisBrit Culture and Heritage (CH) Environment (E) Cities and Towns (CT) Activities (A) Time (T) People (P) Accommodation (Ac) Food and Restaurants (FR) General Location (GL)

% 1.7 1.24 0.7 0.6 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.3

Semantic field (nouns) VisIt Culture and Heritage (CH) Environment (E) General Location (GL) Cities and Towns (CT) Food and Restaurants (F) Administration (Ad) Activities (A) Time (T) Colours (C) Beauty (B) People (P)

% 2.1 2.05 1.16 1 1 0.8 0.75 0.5 0.13 0.13 0.12

Before comparing the two lists of semantic fields, a number of examples of expressions showing how nouns belonging to the different semantic fields operationalize the AIDA model steps will be provided4. The following expressions illustrate the Attention and Interest steps: -

-

4

La fortezza di Castelvecchio, oggi sede del museo di Arte Moderna … (CH) (The fortress of Castelvecchio, now seat of the museum of Modern Art) Reggio Emilia è una città d’arte con un grande patrimonio artistico … (CH) (Reggio Emilia is a city of art with a great artistic heritage)

Back translations into English are as literal as possible in order to give a better idea of the features of the language used in Italian.

Chapter Two

88 -

-

-

-

Circondata quasi completamente dal mare, la provincia di Lecce … (E) (Almost entirely surrounded by the sea, the province of Lecce) Terra di antiche tradizioni, il Molise offre … (E) (Land of ancient traditions, the Molise region offers) … in questa zona si trova il parco naturale del Sulcis. (GL) (in this area there is the natural reserve of Sulcis) Elea (oggi Velia), antica città famosa per aver ospitato grandi uomini …. (CT) (Elea (today Velia), ancient city famous for having hosted great men) La cucina locale è legata ai prodotti della terra … (FR) (Local cuisine is linked to the produce grown in the area) Altri piatti tipici della città sono la gallina al mirto … (FR) (Other typical dishes of the city are hen cooked with myrtle) La provincia di Trapani si estende nella parte più occidentale della regione Sicilia. (Ad) (The province of Trapani is in the most western part of the Sicily region) Gli sport invernali trovano sede ideale sul Terminillo. (A) (Winter sports find their ideal place on the Terminillo mountain) La Certosa di Pavia viene completata quasi un secolo dopo … (T) (The Certosa di Pavia monastery was completed almost a century later) le sue acque benefiche famose fin dal tempo degli Etruschi … (T) (its healing waters which were famous since Etruscan times)

Some expressions containing the same nouns illustrate the Desire step: -

-

Interessante una visita al Museo Archeologico Provinciale … (CH) (Interesting is a visit to the Provincial Archaeological Museum) Napoli è un vero scrigno di tesori d’arte e di storia. (CH) (Neaples is a real casket of treasures of art and history) … è il luogo ideale anche per gli amanti del mare … (E) (it is the ideal place for sea lovers too) i loro tesori d’arte rendono unica questa terra, ricca di colori, profumi e sapori … (E) (their art treasures make this land unique, rich of colours, scents and flavours) nella zona è possibile fare diverse escursioni … (GL) (in the area it is possible to make several excursions) Trieste, affascinante città d’arte affacciata sul mare … (CT) (Trieste, fascinating city of art by the sea) Numerose le feste e le sagre dedicate ai prodotti tipici … (FR) (There are several festivals devoted to local products) Piatti indimenticabili del territorio sono la pasta con le sarde … (FR) (Unforgettable dishes of the area are pasta with sardines)

The AIDA Model, Corpus Linguistics and Tourist Promotion -

-

-

-

89

La provincia di Isernia è molto apprezzata dagli amanti dello sci … (Ad) (The province of Isernia is much appreciated by ski lovers) Chi ama lo sport e la vita all’aria aperta non può dimenticarsi del Lago … (A) (Those who love sports and life in the open air cannot forget the Lake) E’ inoltre possibile praticare sport come golf e parapendio … (A) (It is also possible to practice sports such as golf and paragliding) sarà un’esperienza indimenticabile fuori dal tempo … (T) (It will be an unforgettable experience out of time) Agli amanti del mare, la provincia di Isernia offre 30km di costa … (P) (To sea lovers the province of Isernia offers 30km of coastline) … dove il fascino del passato si unisce a quello della natura … (B) (where the charm of past times combines with that of nature) Paesaggi incontaminati immersi nel verde delle valli sinuose … (C) (Unspoilt landscapes immersed in the green of rolling valleys)

As anticipated above, only when embedded in expressions such as da non perdere (not to be missed – 0.12%) the most frequent nouns in the VisIt seem to exhibit a weakened version of the Action step or even better a step which is halfway between Desire and Action. Examples are da non perdere una visita al museo archeologico nazionale (not to be missed a visit to the national archaeological museum) and da visitare (to be visited – 0.04%) such as in da visitare anche la riserva marina di Torre Guaceto (to be also visited the marine reserve of Torre Guaceto). Persuasion is never achieved through Imperative forms and readers are never directly invited to take advantage of what is offered. Places and attractions are described as possibilities and opportunities indicating categories of people these possibilities are ideal for, such as amanti (lovers) and appassionati (enthusiasts). Going back to the analysis of semantic fields from a contrastive perspective, it is interesting to note that although a comparison of semantic fields in the two corpora may apparently suggest that the two websites give similar priority to similar concepts, a look at the words constituting these semantic fields may be particularly insightful. In the VisIt corpus, the semantic field of Culture and Heritage has two frequent words which are totally absent in the VisBrit corpus: tradizioni (traditions) and its singular form tradizione which added together occur with a percentage of 0.15%. If we add to this figure the percentage of occurrence of the adjective tradizionale (together with all its declensions), the total percentage increases to 0.2%. In the VisBrit corpus the noun ‘tradition’ and its plural ‘traditions’ occur only 14 times while the adjective

90

Chapter Two

‘traditional’ is much more frequent with 68 entries, corresponding to 0.08%. These figures suggest that tradition is much more important in the Italian promotion than in the British one. The semantic field of Environment demonstrates many similarities in the two corpora as it features words such as ‘sea’, ‘coast’, ‘mountain’, ‘lakes’, etc., both in the VisIt and in the VisBrit. Interesting differences are related to the words ‘countryside’ and ‘wildlife’ present in the VisBrit corpus but whose literal equivalents are absent in the VisIt corpus and to the noun natura (nature) which is frequent in the Italian corpus but apparently does not display a similar frequent literal correspondence in the VisBrit corpus. A look at the clusters of these four words reveals that although they all refer to the environment where the attraction is set, they focus on different aspects. ‘Countryside’ (0.07%) and ‘wildlife’ (0.05%) are described as something that can be seen and observed, thus operationalizing the Attention and Interest steps, while natura is described as a source of pleasure and relaxation, as suggested by the frequent expression a stretto contatto con la natura, which emphasises the attractiveness of the destination and illustrates the Desire step. Furthermore, as already mentioned above, the Italian word natura has a very high frequency in the VisIt corpus which corresponds to 0.17%. Its English literal equivalent ‘nature’ has a percentage of frequency of 0.03%. Differences between the two corpora in the semantic field of Activities reveal that the two websites advertise possible activities as pull factors, in two different ways: the British website uses both general words such as ‘tour’, ‘trip’, and ‘experience’ and specific words such as ‘zoos’, ‘walks’, ‘golf’, ‘picnic’, ‘music’ and ‘nightlife’ to advertise possible activities in Great Britain; the Italian website more frequently uses generic words such as visita (visit), percorso/i (route/s), itinerari (itineraries), escursioni (excursions). The semantic field of Food is much more frequent in the VisIt than in the VisBrit and this reveals its importance in the promotion of Italy. Furthermore, while the semantic field of Food in the VisBrit is composed of very general nouns such as ‘food’, ‘drink’, ‘pubs’, and ‘restaurants’, the Italian semantic field of Food is much more varied with words such as prodotti (products), vini (wines), dolci (sweets), pesce (fish), carne (meat), formaggi (cheese), pane (bread), etc. An interesting difference, in terms of semantic fields, is the low frequency, in the VisIt corpus, of the People semantic field which contains only two words amanti (lovers) and appassionati (enthusiasts). Conversely, in the VisBrit corpus the People semantic field is mainly composed of the nouns ‘family/ies’, ‘children’, ‘kids’, ‘people’, ‘adults’.

The AIDA Model, Corpus Linguistics and Tourist Promotion

91

What is interesting, in the VisBrit, is the very frequent focus on attractions and activities that can be enjoyed by the whole family. The VisIt corpus refers to families in only 11 instances (less than 0.01%) and to children in only 14 entries (0.01%) showing that either they are not used as a pull factor in the promotion or that there is no need to specify that what is being offered is ideal for families and children. In the VisIt corpus there are also two new semantic fields which are not very frequent (0.13%) but which are absent in the VisBrit and, for this reason, constitute a peculiarity of the Italian promotion: they are the Colours semantic field and the Beauty semantic field. The nouns included in these semantic fields are bellezza and fascino, and colori and verde. These nouns are mainly used to achieve Desire as visible in expressions such as dove lo sfarzo del barocco si unisce alla bellezza della natura (where the splendour of the Baroque art combines with the beauty of nature) and questa terra ricca di colori, profumi e sapori (this land rich of colours, scents and flavours).

2.4.2 Frequent verbs in the VisIt The most frequent verb in the first 400 words of the VisIt is offrire (offer) in the 3rd person singular offre and in the 3rd person plural offrono. This verb is followed in the list by the reflexive verb trovarsi (find oneself), mostly used in the 3rd person singular and the 3rd person plural si trova/si trovano (are/are set) used to describe the location of the places, attractions and facilities being advertised. The verb si estende (literally ‘(it) extends’) is similarly used to describe the location of places. These first four verbs are a clear linguistic device used to effect the first two steps of the model, Attention and Interest, in that their function is to make readers aware of the features of the destination. Scrolling down the list, we find the verb perdere (miss) which, in more than 95% of cases, is used in the expression da non perdere (not to be missed) followed by names of places or attractions. This usage suggests that this expression is used as a persuasive strategy to emphasise the attractiveness and the desirability of the destination (Desire) and to invite to Action indirectly. Two other interesting verbs are custodisce ((it) safeguards) and conserva ((it) preserves) both used in the 3rd person singular form. Custodisce is used to describe the precious things which are ‘safeguarded’ by churches, historic centres or cities whereas conserva co-occurs with names of cities and towns which preserve intact their cultural heritage and

92

Chapter Two

their splendour. These verbs are, therefore, used to refer to the uniqueness and timeless significance of the places being described and are thus used as persuasive strategies to attract the potential visitors’ Attention and Interest. Conversely, the verb ama (loves), in the 3rd person singular, is always used in the pattern per chi ama (for those who love) followed by activities or attractions and contributes to the creation of Desire by describing the place as suitable for different kinds of lovers. Three other frequent verbs are ammirare (admire), visitare (visit), and praticare (practice) in the Infinitive form. They have similar collocational profiles as they all co-occur in the impersonal expressions si può/si possono ammirare/visitare/praticare followed by the semantic field of places, attractions and activities (you can admire/visit/practice), or in the expression possibilità di ammirare/praticare followed by the same semantic field (possibility of admiring/practising). In these cases, the attractiveness of the place is emphasised by using pull factors referring to attractions and activities (Desire).

2.4.3 Frequent adjectives in the VisIt As shown in Table 2.6, the Italian adjectives which have the highest frequency of occurrence belong to the semantic field of Time and are: storico (historic – masc. sing.), antica (ancient – fem. sing.), antiche (ancient – fem. pl.), medievale (medieval – masc. and fem. sing), antichi (ancient – masc. pl.), antico (ancient – masc. sing), romana (roman – fem. sing.), storiche (historic – fem. pl.), archeologico (archaeologic – masc. sing.), archeologici (archaeologic – masc. pl.). These adjectives are more frequently used in expressions where brand awareness is created, that is to say in the Attention and Interest steps. Following in order of frequency, are Popularity adjectives, such as grande (great – masc. and fem. sing.), importanti (important – masc. pl.), famoso (famous – masc. sing.), importante (important – masc. sing.), famosi (famous – masc. pl.), nota (known – fem. sing.), famosa (famous – fem. sing.), grandi (great – masc. pl.), which are used both to describe the status of the destination (Attention and Interest) and to persuade readers that the attractions and the destinations advertised are a must-see (Desire). General Location adjectives are tipici (typical – masc. pl.), locali (local – masc. and fem. pl.), nazionale (national – masc. sing.), locale (local – masc. and fem. sing.), caratteristici (characteristic – masc. pl.), tipico (typical – masc. sing.), regionale (regional – masc. and fem. sing.) and are used in expressions which illustrate the first three steps.

The AIDA Model, Corpus Linguistics and Tourist Promotion

93

Uniqueness and Desirability adjectives, that is to say ricca (rich – fem. sing.), ricco (rich – masc. sing.), ideale (ideal – masc. and fem. sing.) are mainly used in the Desire step as well as Size adjectives, such as grande (big – masc. and fem. sing.), grandi (big – masc. and fem. pl.), piccoli (small – masc. sing.), imponente (majestic/imposing – masc. and fem. sing). Environment adjectives, that is to say naturale (natural – masc. and fem. sing.) and its plural declension naturali (masc. and fem.) are both used in the cognitive stage and in the Desire step while Beauty adjectives, such as splendido (wonderful – masc. sing.), suggestivi (suggestive/evocative – masc. pl.), splendida (wonderful – fem. sing.) are used only in the Desire step. TABLE 2.6. Semantic fields of adjectives and their frequency in the VisIt Semantic field (adjectives) Time Popularity General Location Uniqueness and Desirability Size Environment Beauty

Acronym T Po GL UD S E B

% 0.70 0.47 0.44 0.25 0.20 0.15 0.13

The following are some examples of how the adjectives listed above combine with other elements to create Attention, Interest and Desire. The first group contains the linguistic representation of Attention and Interest: -

-

-

Il centro storico presenta l’antica struttura medievale, con stretti vicoli … (T) (The historic centre shows the ancient medieval structure with narrow streets) La provincia è inoltre attraversata da due importanti fiumi … (Po) (The province is also crossed by two important rivers) I prodotti tipici di questa zona della Sardegna sono molti … (GL) (The typical produce of this part of Sardinia are many) La zona è ricca di corsi d’acqua, tra cui i fiumi Velino, Salto e Turano … (UD) (The area is rich of water streams among which the rivers Velino, Salto and Turano) … tre portali di ingresso con un grande rosone posto su quello centrale … (S) (three doors and a big rose window above the central door)

Chapter Two

94 -

si arriva al Gran Bosco della Mesola, una riserva naturale visitabile solo in parte … (E) (you get to Gran Bosco della Mesola, a nature reserve that can only be partially visited)

The following sentences and phrases are examples of the third step, Desire: -

-

-

Sovrano incontrastato di questa antica e splendida terra … (T) (Uncontested sovereign of this ancient and wonderful land) Villa Taranto, tra i giardini botanici più noti e importanti d’Europa … (Po) (Villa Taranto, among the most popular and important botanic gardens in Europe) … il territorio è ricco di paesaggi tipici da non perdere … (GL) (the territory is rich of typical landscapes that cannot be missed) E’ una terra ricca di fascino: le sue meravigliose coste … (UD) (It’s a land rich of charm: its wonderful coastline) Questi ambienti offrono una grande varietà di panorami di estrema bellezza … (S) (These places offer a great variety of landscapes which are all of extreme beauty) Immersa in uno scenario naturale unico e completo … (E) (Immersed in a unique and complete natural scenery) Lo splendido paesaggio offerto da questa terra invita a intraprendere un viaggio … (B) (The wonderful views offered by this land invite to take a trip)

In summarizing the results achieved in the analysis of frequencies in the VisIt, it may be suggested that the Italian promotion mainly focuses on culture, heritage and environment. A special emphasis is given to cities of art, to traditions, to a relaxing and recharging contact with nature and to local produce and recipes that constitute the pull factors, the motivational desires of the persuasive process. In the following section, the analysis of frequencies will be carried out in the VisAus corpus in order to identify specific features of the promotion of Australia and to compare and contrast the results with the analyses carried out in the VisBrit and the VisIt.

2.5 Frequencies in the VisAus corpus The Australian corpus (VisAus) is the biggest of the three with 183,445 tokens and 12,363 types. The STTR is 45.83 and is very similar to that of the VisBrit corpus which is 45.28, suggesting that the VisAus

The AIDA Model, Corpus Linguistics and Tourist Promotion

95

corpus also shows features which are halfway between a spoken and a written genre. The first content word is in position no.17 and is ‘Australia’, followed immediately by ‘park’ and ‘national’. Table 2.7 provides a list of the first 40 words in the VisAus wordlist. TABLE 2.7. List of the first 40 content words in the VisAus Word 1.Australia 4.see 7.south 10.aboriginal 13.walk 16.take 19.great 22.north 25.city 28.head 31.find 34.valley 37. home 40. water

% 0.48 0.34 0.29 0.26 0.23 0.21 0.20 0.18 0.16 0.14 0.13 0.13 0.12 0.12

Word 2.park 5.beach 8.island 11.bay 14.drive 17.art 20.visit 23.heritage 26.wine 29.centre 32.swim 35.sea 38. rock

% 0.43 0.32 0.28 0.26 0.22 0.20 0.20 0.18 0.15 0.14 0.13 0.13 0.12

Word 3.national 6.world 9.Australian 12.river 15.day 18.beaches 21. coast 24.explore 27.local 30.rainforest 33.reef 36.learn 39. town

% 0.40 0.30 0.26 0.26 0.21 0.20 0.19 0.17 0.14 0.13 0.13 0.12 0.12

As suggested by the list, the Australian promotion mainly refers to and focuses on the environment. For obvious historical reasons, items such as ‘castle’, ‘church’, ‘history’, ‘historic’, which are so frequent both in the VisBrit and in the VisIt are absent in the first 40 words of the VisAus. The only reference to history and culture can be seen in the word ‘heritage’ which, however in most cases refers to ‘world heritage national parks’. In order to have a general idea of the type of promotion used by the Australian website, these first 40 content words have been grouped according to their grammatical category, that is to say nouns, verbs and adjectives. Instances of the same word but with different grammatical function (noun, adjective or verb) will be counted separately. The most frequent nouns5 are 13 and are: ‘Australia’, ‘park’, ‘beach’, ‘bay’, ‘island’, ‘beaches’, ‘river’, ‘south’, coast’, ‘day’, ‘world’, ‘walk’, ‘home’, ‘town’. 5

By the most frequent nouns we mean those nouns which have a frequency of occurrence not lower than 0.12% which is the frequency of the 40th word and corresponds to one-fourth of the frequency of the 1st word in the list. Many of the words appearing in the wordlist perform more than one grammatical function and

96

Chapter Two

Verbs are 9 and are: ‘see’, ‘take’, visit, ‘explore’, ‘head’, ‘find’, ‘swim’, ‘learn’, ‘walk’. Adjectives are 11 and are: ‘national’, ‘Australian’, ‘aboriginal’, ‘great’, ‘heritage’, ‘world’, ‘local’, ‘north’, ‘south’, ‘sea’, and ‘rock’. Some similarities and, perhaps, many differences can be identified between the VisAus wordlist and the lists of the other two corpora. As mentioned above, reference to the past and to artistic heritage is almost absent. This may be due to the relatively recent history of Australia with respect to the other two European countries but it may also be due to different promotional choices which tend more towards the enhancement of the outdoors rather than of historic and artistic attractions. The focus on Action is another distinguishing feature of this corpus. Among the first 40 words in the VisAus corpus, there are 9 verbs. This is a very high number if compared with the 5 verbs identified among the first 40 words in the VisBrit and only 2 verbs among the first 40 words in the VisIt. This seems to confirm what has been suggested by the analysis of images in chapter one, that is to say that the type of promotion proposed by the Australian website constantly invites readers to take action and mainly describes Australia through the several activities which can be enjoyed by tourists. It can be hypothesized that, in the promotion of Australia, the third and the fourth steps of the AIDA model, Desire and Action, are more frequently and strategically used rather than the first two, Attention and Interest, which, for example, are more emphasised in the Italian promotion. As suggested by the clusters of words referring to the environment, an important feature of the description of places is connected with the activities that are available or that can be enjoyed in that location. For example, the noun ‘rainforest’ can be found in clusters such as ‘walk/hike/ride/bushwalk through rainforest’, or ‘explore/bushwalk/walk through lush rainforest’. However, a clearer picture of the features of the Australian promotion can emerge from a closer analysis of the content words occurring among the first 425 items, that is to say of those words with a frequency of occurrence which is not lower than 0.04%6. for this reason the percentage of occurrence indicated in the table refers to all the occurrences of the lemma. The word ‘drive’, for example, occurs both as a noun and as a verb: however, as a noun it has a percentage of occurrence of 0.11 % which is lower than 0.12%. This is the reason why it is not considered among the most frequent words at this stage of the analysis. 6 This threshold has been set for the VisBrit corpus and adopted for the analysis of all the corpora under examination in this chapter.

The AIDA Model, Corpus Linguistics and Tourist Promotion

97

2.5.1 Frequent nouns in the VisAus As expected, the most frequent semantic field with a percentage of occurrence of about 4.7% is the semantic field of Environment, which is followed by three semantic fields which are more or less similarly frequent (1%, 1%, 0.9%), that is to say General location, Activities, and Culture and Heritage (Table 2.8). TABLE 2.8. Semantic fields of nouns and their frequency in the VisAus Semantic field (nouns) Environment General Location Activities Culture and Heritage Cities and Towns Time Food and Restaurants Administration People

Acronym E GL A CH CT T FR A P

% 4.7 1 1 0.9 0.8 0.6 0.4 0.3 0.14

The Environment semantic field contains nouns such as ‘park’, ‘beach’, ‘island’, ‘bay’, ‘river’, ‘coast’, ‘rainforest’, ‘valley’, ‘harbour’, etc., while the General Location semantic field groups words such as ‘world’, ‘south’, ‘north’, ‘home’, ‘place’, ‘east’, ‘area’, ‘part’ and other similar items. In the Activities semantic field, there are specific or generic nouns related to activities such as ‘tour/s’, ‘trail’, ‘journey’, ‘adventure’, ‘walks’, ‘activities’, ‘shopping’, ‘bike’ and so on. The Culture and Heritage semantic field includes the nouns ‘art’, ‘festival’, ‘culture’, ‘galleries’, ‘sites’, ‘museum’, ‘events’, ‘gallery’, ‘artists’ and ‘fashion’, and the Cities and Towns semantic field is comprised of nouns such as ‘city’, ‘centre’, ‘town’, ‘street’, ‘road’, ‘highway’, ‘village’, ‘buildings’ and other similar items. The nouns included in the semantic field of Time are ‘day/s’, ‘time’, ‘year/s’, ‘hour/s’, ‘season’ and ‘summer’. The semantic field of Food and Restaurants has only 7 items which are: ‘wine’, ‘food’, ‘restaurant/s’, ‘wineries’, ‘bars’, and ‘produce’. The Administrative semantic field is comprised of the nouns ‘region’, ‘country’, ‘territory’, and ‘capital’, and finally the People semantic field is the least frequent with only two nouns, ‘people’ and ‘visitors’, which seem to be used only in the first three steps of the model. The difference in the results obtained from the analysis of the VisBrit and the VisIt is evident: in those corpora the semantic field of

Chapter Two

98

Environment comes as second, after the semantic field of Culture and Heritage. Furthermore, while in the VisBrit and in the VisIt the most frequent semantic field is Culture and Heritage which has a percentage of occurrence ranging from 1.7% (VisBrit) to 2.1% (VisIt), in the VisAus the semantic field of Environment has a percentage which is about three times higher (4.7%) and the Culture and Heritage semantic field occurs with a percentage of only 0.9%. A look at the percentages of the other semantic fields in the VisAus confirms that the promotion is largely based on the description of the environment. The semantic field of Cities and Towns occurs less than 1% and the percentage of the Time and Food group is even lower. Low-frequency semantic fields group words referring to government and to administrative definitions of the country’s areas plus words referring to people. It is interesting to note that, for example, although the noun ‘park’ and its literal Italian equivalent parco are quite frequent in the three corpora, these items show many differences in terms of usage. While in the VisBrit and VisIt the focus is mainly on what the park is home to or what the park has to offer or simply on the fact that in the area being described there is a park, in the VisAus parks are mentioned as places where activities can be carried out or as destinations for activities such as hiking or riding. Something similar happens with ‘sea’ and its Italian equivalent mare: in the VisIt the three-word clusters of mare are many, such as amanti del mare (sea lovers), a picco/strapiombo sul mare (with a sheer drop to the sea), azzurro del mare (blue of the sea), (sul) livello del mare (above sea level), un mare cristallino (crystal waters of the sea), vacanza al mare (holiday by the sea), and so on. In the VisBrit, the three-word clusters of ‘sea’ are very few and are ‘by the sea’ and ‘over the sea’ referring to views or to the location of places. In the VisAus, ‘sea’ is used, in most clusters, as an adjective of words such as ‘eagles’, ‘lions’, ‘turtles’, ‘cliffs’, ‘kayak’, ‘deep sea fishing’, that is to say something to see, join, or try. The nouns listed above according to the different semantic fields that characterise the Australian promotion are used in all the steps of the model, even though they illustrate more frequently the Desire and Action steps. The following are some examples grouped according to the different stages in which they are used. Attention and Interest: -

The Moreton Island national park covers around 98% of the island. (E) The closest island to the mainland is Long Island. (E)

The AIDA Model, Corpus Linguistics and Tourist Promotion -

In 1895 and 1897, devastating fires ripped through the area, gutting many old buildings. (GL) From east to west it touches both the Queensland and West Australian borders. (GL) The trail weaves through 2.5 km of tropical rainforest, crossing five crystalline creeks. (A) The Tiwi islands are known for their colourful art and craft … (CH) Both bays are close to the bustling holiday town of The Entrance. (CT) The cyclone season in Cairns is generally from November to May. (T) This year these themed weeks highlights art and culture, food and wine, family fun … (FR) Pockets of dry rainforest live in Western Australia’s Kimberley region. (Ad) Water taxis and ferries shuttle guests and day visitors out to the island and its resorts … (P)

Desire: -

… where you can swim, snorkel, horse ride and hike through the national park. (E) Life on an almost-deserted island has never been so relaxing. (E) Other activities in the area include quad biking, horse-riding and handgliding as well. (GL) … history and high adventure in the heart of Western Australia’s wild west. (GL) Like a quality box of chocolates, this trail offers the best of South Australia’s wildly assorted scenic beauty. (A) You can pick up handmade art and crafts, fresh produce and locally designed clothes … (CH) … there’s much to do in and around this legendary outback town. (CT) This season of brilliant sunshine and drenching rains will leave you feeling … (T) … you can enjoy some of the world’s best food and wine in some of the world’s most stunning surroundings. (FR) You can also tour the region by motorbike, vintage car, hot air balloon or helicopter. (Ad) Visitors will discover emerging and established artists … (P)

Action: -

Bushwalk and mountain bike in Namadgi National Park, near Canberra … (E) Visit the island in August to attend the Audi Hamilton Island Race Week. (E)

99

Chapter Two

100 -

… explore the area on an Aboriginal walking tour, learning about fish, crabs … (GL) Head to Western Australia’s south-west for a weekend filled with fabulous food … (GL) Visit world-class wineries and follow a food and wine trail. (A) Marvel at the diversity of Aboriginal art and appreciate it as a whole at the National Gallery. (CH) Visit an underground opal mining town and the Simpson desert. (CT) After a leisurely breakfast, sail an hour and a half to Sawmill Beach … (T) Find art, fashion and food on Melbourne’s Soho strip. (FR) Explore the region’s World War II history in the Army Hospital … (Ad)

2.5.2 Frequent verbs in the VisAus Verbs play a role of utmost importance in the promotion of Australia as suggested by the presence of 54 verbs (apart from ‘to be’, and ‘to have’) among the first 425 words of the VisAus. 40 verbs out of 54 clearly refer to activities that can be performed and enjoyed by visitors, from just seeing or visiting a place to something more demanding such as surfing, diving, and climbing. These verbs are almost always used in the Imperative form and thus, can be defined as invitational Imperatives which aim to invite the reader to visit Australia and to enjoy the activities advertised. Only 5 verbs out of 54 are used in descriptions of attractions and destinations and are not in the Imperative form: they are ‘offer/s’, ‘held’, ‘include, ‘located’, and ‘built’.

2.5.3 Frequent adjectives in the VisAus As visible in Table 2.9, the most frequent group of adjectives in the VisAus belongs to the General Location semantic field, which includes adjectives such as ‘Australian’, ‘local’, ‘northern’, ‘western’, ‘coastal’, ‘national’, etc. This semantic field has a percentage of occurrence of 2% which is quite high if compared with the second most frequent semantic field, that groups together Size adjectives, which has a percentage of 0.6% and is constituted of the adjectives ‘largest’, ‘short’, ‘high’, ‘long’, ‘big’, ‘huge’, ‘little’, ‘small’, ‘deep’, ‘remote’, and ‘vast’. Other semantic fields include: Time adjectives (0.5%) such as ‘new’, ‘historic’, ‘old’, ‘ancient’, ‘oldest’, ‘royal’ and ‘day’; Beauty adjectives (0.4%) that is to say ‘spectacular’, ‘scenic’, ‘unique’, ‘beautiful’, ‘perfect’, ‘stunning’, and ‘pristine’ which are used only in the Desire and Action steps; Uniqueness and Desirability adjectives (0.4%) such as ‘best’, ‘rich’’, ‘good’ and

The AIDA Model, Corpus Linguistics and Tourist Promotion

101

‘great’; Culture and Heritage (0.4%) grouping the adjectives ‘cultural’, ‘heritage’, ‘art’, and ‘traditional’; Popularity adjectives (0.35%) such as ‘famous’, ‘top’, ‘popular’, ‘known’, ‘public’ and ‘iconic’; Colour adjectives (0.2%) that is to say ‘red’, ‘green’, ‘white’ and blue’; Food adjectives (0.2%) which are only 3 and are ‘wine’, ‘food’ and ‘fresh’; Environment adjectives (0.15%) constituted only of ‘river’ and ‘sea’, and Activity adjectives (0.13%) including ‘working’, ‘surf’, ‘fishing’, and ‘walking’. TABLE 2.9. Semantic fields of adjectives and their frequency in the VisAus Semantic field (adjectives) General Location Size Time Beauty Uniqueness and Desirability Culture and Heritage Popularity Colour Food Environment Activity

Acronym GL S T B UD CH Po Co F E A

% 2 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.4 0.4 0.35 0.2 0.2 0.15 0.13

Both in the VisBrit and in the VisIt, Time adjectives constitute the most frequent semantic field, logically linked to the most frequent semantic field of Culture and Heritage nouns. The group of Size adjectives comes fourth in the VisBrit and fifth in the VisIt. Conversely, in the Australian promotion, adjectives are used to qualify and describe places and environments mainly in terms of location and size. The examples which follow show how the four steps of the model are represented in expressions that include the adjectives listed above. The Attention and Interest steps are visible in the following sentences: -

Local accommodation ranges from luxury hotels and house to B&Bs … (GL) Formed millions of year ago, the name was given to Australia’s largest group of offshore islands by Captain Cook. (S) In the mid-1880s, many new settlers began farming in the area. (T) The best chances of seeing emus in the wild is in grasslands … (UD) Trout fishing is extremely popular and is best in the spring season. (Po)

Chapter Two

102 -

… a long golden chain split across both sides of the harbour and fringed by green bush and sea. (Co) Western Australia’s fresh truffle season runs from June to September. (F) Humidity is highest but is offset by cool sea breezes. (E) A waterfront walking track leads from Mooloolaba to Maroochydore … (A)

Some examples of Desire are provided below: -

There are many day spas and local hot springs in which to relax and unwind. (GL) The next must-see is Wangi Falls, Litchfield’s largest and most accessible waterfall. (S) Here, in the wide, open spaces, a new adventure awaits you at every turn. (T) Australia is a spectacular, diverse continent offering many iconic destinations … (B) Some of Australia’s best bands play live every night on the centrallylocated Front Street. (UD) The tree-lined park is popular for family picnics and riotous soccer games. (Po) … in the scorched desert you’ll find purple vegetation and lush green waterholes. (Co) Here you can eat fresh crayfish straight from the ocean … (F) You can also join a deep-sea fishing excursion … (E) You can choose from a number of walking trails that range from easy strolls to longer, more difficult tracks. (A)

Action is operationalised by adjectives in Imperative expressions such as the following ones: -

Watch local artists at work in their studios or catch an exhibition. (GL) See Australia’s largest fur seal colony and get up close to dolphins … (S) Get a new perspective on you fishing expeditions on a heli-fishing trip. (T) Do spectacular cliff-top walks, spot wildlife … (B) Discover the best breaks or learn to surf in our surfing paradise … (UD) Don’t miss the popular Saturday markets … (Po) Watch golden sand morph to green valley as you drive back into Perth. (Co) Take advantage of the fresh food specials at Moonah Island Markets … (F)

The AIDA Model, Corpus Linguistics and Tourist Promotion -

103

Feel the sea spray on your face, hear the blowholes roar … (E) Do an Aboriginal walking tour or bliss out on the white sands … (A)

2.6 Summary The analysis of frequencies in the three corpora has been particularly insightful because it has contributed to the identification of the main features of the promotion of Great Britain, Italy, and Australia. The two European countries, although apparently similar in their emphasis on concepts such as culture, heritage and environment tend to advertise these tourist attractions in different ways by focusing on different aspects. The British promotion mainly proposes castles, parks and museums as places to visit, experience, explore and discover with the whole family. The use of invitational Imperatives but also the use of verbs such as ‘offer’ and ‘provide’ in the Present tense, suggests that descriptions of what is available and invitation to join and experience are combined to reach the final persuasive aim. The AIDA model is well developed in that the four steps seem to be equally emphasised by similar frequent linguistic means. The Italian promotion similarly proposes parks, sea, museums, art, churches, traditions and monuments as places that are located in Italy and that can be seen and admired. The absence of Imperatives suggests the presence of a type of promotion mainly implemented through descriptions, where the persuasive aim is developed more through the mental images that wordings are able to create rather than through an invitation to take action. Descriptions aim at attracting the readers’ Attention and Interest, and the Desire step is less emphasised; Action is never overtly prompted but more softly and covertly communicated. The frequencies in the VisAus, conversely, suggest a more interactive type of promotion where readers are constantly invited to discover Australia through several activities proposed in the website, such as walking, trekking, riding, driving, surfing, and snorkelling in beautiful places such as parks, forests, beaches, deserts, sea, cities and everything the Australian continent can offer. These results suggest that in this website persuasion is achieved through Desire and Action, the latter always overtly communicated. In the following chapter, the analysis will go into further detail and the quantitative analysis will be combined with the qualitative analysis of concordance lines. The usage of the most frequent words in each corpus will be analysed and discussed and results will also be interpreted according to the theories on Cultural Dimensions elaborated by Hofstede (2001).

CHAPTER THREE CONCORDANCES, CULTURAL DIMENSIONS AND TOURIST PROMOTION

In this chapter, the analysis of the features of the tourist promotion of Great Britain, Italy and Australia will be carried out by combining quantitative and qualitative analyses. For this reason, the concordances of some of the most frequent words in each corpus will be analysed and the results thus obtained will be interpreted according to the cultural model proposed by Hofstede (2001). A concordance is a list of all the occurrences of a node word in a corpus. The node word or search word is usually presented in the KWIC format, that is to say, it is aligned in the centre of the output window with a variable length of context on either side of it. The acronym KWIC stands for ‘key word in context’ where ‘key word’ means under examination and does not refer to one of the tools available in the software for linguistic analysis. Many concordancing programs allow the linguist to sort to the left or to the right the words preceding and following the node word under analysis. The decision to sort to one or the other side mainly depends on the grammatical category of the item being investigated: if it is a noun, sorting to the left could reveal the most frequent co-occurring items used to modify that noun; conversely, if the node word is an adjective, sorting should be done to the right to identify the most frequently co-occurring nouns. It is also possible to set the sorting to the right as an option for the words in first position and change the type of sorting for the words in second and third position. The type of evidence provided by a concordance is the starting point for the formulation of a hypothesis which in turn is generalised on the basis of the evidence of the repeated patterns observed. These observations are then unified in a theoretical statement (Tognini Bonelli 2001, p. 2). The procedure to describe the concordance results is, therefore, inductive because it comes from the observation of language use. For this reason, the type of information that can be gathered from a corpus allows the linguist to access simultaneously both the individual instance, which can be read

Concordances, Cultural Dimensions and Tourist Promotion

105

and expanded on the horizontal axis of the concordance, and the social practice, which can be retrieved in the repeated patterns of co-selection on the vertical axis of the concordance (ibid., p. 3-4). The horizontal axis of the concordance, thus, allows the linguist to identify, at the local level, the syntagmatic patterning, while the vertical axis provides what Tognini Bonelli (ibid.) defines as the ‘paradigmatic availability’, that is to say the choice available to a language user at a given point and within a certain language system. Such an analysis allows the linguist to discover patterns which would otherwise be invisible, that is to say what is expected, predictable, usual, normal, and typical in language use (Stubbs 2007, p. 155). The formal patterns which are made visible on the vertical axis of the concordance show that words occur in predictable (or pre-packed) frequently repeated units of meaning, where different types of attractions between words can be observed. Words frequently attract other words thus establishing a type of relationship which has been defined by Sinclair (1991; 1996) by the term ‘collocation’. Collocation is the frequent cooccurrence of one or more words and it is a phenomenon which accounts well for the phraseological tendency of language, where words do not have fixed and independent meanings but acquire meaning from their combination with other words. These combinations are available to language users as ‘semi-preconstructed phrases’ (Sinclair, 1991) and, although apparently analysable into segments, they are retrieved and reused as single chunks of language. Words can also show a certain tendency to co-occur with some classes of grammatical items, such as that of adjectives or of prepositions: this type of attraction is defined ‘colligation’ (Firth, 1968; Sinclair, 1996). Furthermore, in the linguistic co-text of a node word, the presence of words which share (part of) their meaning can be observed in many cases. These words may be grouped into one or more semantic fields which constitute the ‘semantic preference’ (Sinclair, 1996) of a given word, that is to say the attraction at the semantic level between a word and other semantically related words in its immediate context. Once these three phenomena of co-selection have been identified, a further step into abstraction allows the linguist to identify another type of attraction, the ‘semantic prosody’, that is to say the way in which words can be perceived positively or negatively in their semantic environment (Sinclair, 1991; Louw, 1993). According to Sinclair (1996, p. 87), semantic prosodies are “evaluative or attitudinal and are used to express the speaker’s approval (good prosody) or disapproval (bad prosody) of whatever topic is momentarily the object of discourse”.

106

Chapter Three

These four types of relationships between lexical and grammatical items, semantic fields, and connotation of words constitute the unit of meaning (Sinclair, 1996). Identifying the collocation, colligation, semantic preference and semantic prosody of a word means identifying its usage and its meaning. Bearing this in mind, the analysis will consider some of the most frequent words in the three corpora in order to investigate how they are used in the three different contexts. In order to compare and contrast the language used in the three types of promotion, nine words in each corpus will be analysed, namely the three most frequent nouns, the three most frequent verbs, and the three most frequent adjectives. Furthermore, a concordance analysis of modality and of how modality is strategically used for promotional aims will be carried out in the three corpora. Results will be contrasted and compared from two perspectives: the linguistic one, which will focus on usage and on what is un/typical of a language and the cultural perspective which will try to interpret data against the framework provided by Intercultural studies and theories.

3.1 Concordances in the VisBrit Our analysis starts with the VisBrit and in particular with its three most frequent nouns ‘park’, ‘city’ and ‘home’, its three most frequent verbs ‘find’, ‘see’ and ‘take’, and its three most frequent adjectives ‘great’, ‘top’, and ‘national’ (Table 3.1). TABLE 3.1. The three most frequent nouns, verbs and adjectives in the VisBrit Item park home city find see take great top national

Category noun noun noun verb verb verb adjective adjective adjective

% 0.32 0.29 0.24 0.29 0.27 0.20 0.29 0.19 0.19

Concordances, Cultural Dimensions and Tourist Promotion

107

3.1.1 ‘Park’ The word ‘park’ occurs with a percentage of 0.32%. In many instances this item is preceded by names such as ‘Wellington Country Park’ and by adjectives such as ‘theme’, ‘adventure’, ‘water’, ‘national’, ‘safari’, which explain what kind of park it is. A look at the concordance and at the collocates of this word suggests that ‘park’ is mainly used: 1. with ‘set’ or the verb ‘be’ and with expressions such as ‘(in/at the) north/south/centre of the park’ to describe where the park is located or to describe something which is located in the park, such as ‘perfectly preserved 18th-century residence set in a 2,100-acre park’, ‘The Millennium Coastal Park is a 12-mile stretch of coastline on the Burry Estuary’, and ‘Towards the centre of the park, you’ll find the White Peak’. This usage of ‘park’ is an example of the first two steps, Attention and Interest; 2. with ‘home to’ in instances where what the park mainly features is described, and with the verbs ‘have’ and ‘offer’ and with the expression ‘you’ll find’ when the attractions and what the park has to offer are explained as in ‘Britain’s only coastal National Park, home to 240 square miles of rugged cliffs, sandy beaches …’, or in ‘this country park has plenty to offer both to children and adults’, ‘Brecon Beacons National Park offers visitors stunning scenery …’, and ‘you’ll find exquisite gardens at Castle Hill and Tapeley Park’. When ‘home to’ is co-selected with ‘park’, descriptions are part of the brand awareness stage while when the verbs ‘have’ and ‘offer’ are used there is a reference to the desirability of the destination. Conversely, the certainty expressed by the Future ‘you’ll’ only represents the Desire step; 3. with the superlative adjectives ‘largest’, ‘first’, ‘smallest’ in instances such as ‘Britain’s largest National Park, covering 4,528 square kilometres’ and ‘Longleat was the first safari park to be opened outside of Africa’; these collocations are part of both the Attention and Interest steps and of the Desire step, as they provide information on the status of the destination but also on how exclusive and worth visiting the place is; 4. in lists of attractions available in the area. The presence of Imperatives linked to ‘park’ is visible in 5% of the total instances and is mainly expressed by verbs such as ‘visit’, ‘head to’, ‘explore’, ‘enjoy’, and ‘stay’ which represent the Action step.

108

Chapter Three

3.1.2 ‘Home’ ‘Home’ is another frequent word in the VisBrit with a percentage of 0.29%. In more than 50% of instances, this item is used in the expression ‘to be home to’ and in 13% of instances ‘home’ is followed by the preposition ‘of’. In the remaining instances ‘home’ is modified by nouns or adjectives such as in ‘stately home’, ‘childhood home’, ‘family home’, and it is preceded by the preposition ‘at’, such as in the expression ‘feel at home’. ‘Home’ is, therefore, mainly and very frequently used to describe what is present in a place, as already noticed in the examples with ‘park’. Results from the concordance analysis suggest that this word functions as an element of the cognitive stage of promotion even though it is also used in expressions where desirability is created. It is never included in expressions which are an invitation to Action.

3.1.3 ‘City’ The word ‘city’ occurs with a percentage of 0.24%. It is mainly used in descriptions where what visitors will find during their visit to the city is explained. This function is linguistically represented by expressions such as ‘(one of) the city’s’, ‘the city is home to’, ‘in the heart of the city’ and with the prepositions ‘in’, ‘across’, ‘throughout’, ‘all over’, thus satisfying the Attention and Interest steps. The places and the attractions of the city which are mostly advertised are theatres, cultural venues, history, heritage, historical attractions, museums, nightlife, restaurants and pubs, shopping centres, gardens, views and so on. In about 4% of its instances there is a direct invitation to potential visitors to enjoy what the city has to offer, which is indicated by Imperatives (Action). Frequent verbs and expressions with verbs are ‘explore’, ‘visit’, ‘head to’, ‘don’t miss’, ‘take a walk’, ‘take a trip’, ‘get to know’. In a few instances, desirability is produced by expressions with modals, such as ‘you’ll find’, ‘you can explore’ and ‘you can experience’. The concordance analyses described above suggest that these nouns are mainly used in expressions which represent the first two steps, Attention and Interest but they are also used, although less frequently, to enhance Desire. The fourth step, Action, is also present but with a very low frequency. As anticipated above, the most frequent verbs in the VisBrit are ‘find’, ‘see’ and ‘take’. A concordance analysis of these items will allow us to

Concordances, Cultural Dimensions and Tourist Promotion

109

identify their usages and their role in the promotion of Great Britain as a tourist destination.

3.1.4 ‘Find’ ‘Find’ occurs with a percentage of 0.29%. In more than 50% of instances this verb is used with the modal ‘will’ to describe what visitors will certainly find, thus invoking Desire. In 25% of cases it is used in the expression ‘(to) find out more’ which usually has the function of redirecting the search to another page of the website where more details can be accessed. Interestingly, this verb is not used to prompt Action but to stimulate Desire by describing and promising. When it is used in expressions such as ‘to find out more’ it becomes an element of the cognitive stage and is therefore used to boost Attention and Interest.

3.1.5 ‘See’ This verb occurs with a percentage of 0.27%. In 23% of its instances it is used in the Imperative form to suggest places, attractions and activities to visitors (Action). In 17% of instances it is used with the modal ‘can’ to describe what visitors can do in the places advertised and thus enhance desirability. A similar function is performed when ‘see’ is used together with the modal ‘will’ in the expression ‘you’ll (also) see’ occurring in 9% of instances even though more certainty is conveyed by the presence of this modal. In 8% of instances ‘see’ is used as an Infinitive in an infinitive clause usually preceded by an Imperative, such as ‘Take a boat trip to Brownsea Island to see red squirrels and deer’. To these instances we can add up other instances where ‘see’ is part of an infinitive clause and is preceded by ‘things’ (10%) as in ‘top 5 things to see and do’, where Action is prompted covertly, and by ‘so much’, ‘plenty’ and ‘a lot’ (8%) in the expressions ‘there’s so much/plenty/a lot to see’ where Desire is expressed. ‘See’ is also used in the expression ‘must-see’ in 6% of instances with the function of describing the destination or the attraction as unique and worth visiting and, for this reason, desirable.

3.1.6 ‘Take’ The verb ‘take’ occurs with a percentage of 21%. In 25% of its instances it collocates with nouns referring to trips and tours such as ‘tour’, ‘trip’, ‘cruise’, ‘ferry’, ‘walk’ and ‘journey’. In these cases it is

110

Chapter Three

mainly used in the Imperative form to prompt Action but there are also many cases in which it is preceded by the modal ‘can’, thus encouraging Desire. In 11.5% of instances ‘take’ co-occurs with the nouns ‘family’, ‘children’ and ‘kids’. These collocations are part of descriptions where places which are ideal for children and families are described. These descriptions promote Desire. In 17% of its instances, ‘take’ is included in the phrasal verb ‘take in’ in the Imperative form and is followed by collocates such as ‘views/scenery’, ‘play’, ‘local culture’ and so on. These collocations always illustrate the Action step. The Imperative form is the most used tense for this verb (60%). As for modals, ‘can’ occurs with ‘take’ in 9% of cases, while ‘will’ is rarely used (1.5%). For this reason, it may be assumed that this verb is predominantly used to invite potential visitors to Action and in some cases it is also used to enhance Desire. It is interesting to note that the three most frequent verbs of the VisBrit perform slightly different functions in terms of promotion. While ‘take’ is predominantly used to prompt Action, ‘see’ combines Desire and Action in its usages. Conversely, ‘find’ is mainly used to promote Desire and less frequently Attention and Interest but it is never used to prompt Action. The analysis continues with the concordances of the three most frequent adjectives, namely ‘great’, ‘top’, and ‘national’.

3.1.7 ‘Great’ ‘Great’ is a very frequent item in the VisBrit having a percentage of 0.29%1. It is embedded in the expressions ‘great (family) day out’ (7%), ‘great place to/for’ (7%), ‘great offers’ (5.5%), ‘great way to/for’ (5%), followed by less frequent collocations such as ‘great view/s’ (2%), ‘great attractions’ (2%), and ‘great time’ (1.8%). All these collocations are part of descriptions where the advantages of the area or of places are described, such as: ‘A visit to one of Britain’s fantastic zoos is a great family day out’, ‘The World Museum in Liverpool is a great place to spend a day’, and ‘This all-weather attraction is a great way to teach children about animals …’.

1

The instances where ‘great’ is used in the name ‘Great Britain’ have not been considered for analysis.

Concordances, Cultural Dimensions and Tourist Promotion

111

All the expressions in which ‘great’ is used are examples of Desire where the suitability of what is offered for specific categories of people is described and where the desirability of the place and of what is offered is emphasised.

3.1.8 ‘Top’ The word ‘top’ occurs with a percentage of 0.19%. In 32% of its instances it occurs in the phrases ‘top night time must-do’s’ and ‘top daytime must-do’s’. To these, other similar instances can be added, such as ‘top 5 things to see and do’ (11.5%). Another frequent collocate is ‘attraction/s’ (16%), while other collocates occurring less frequently than 3% are: ‘beaches’, ‘hotels’, ‘hostels’, ‘walk/s’, ‘spots’, ‘places’, ‘location’, and so on. This adjective describes both the level of popularity of attractions (Attention and Interest) and the attractiveness of the destinations (Desire) but the expressions in which it is embedded are predominantly used to promote Desire and to describe destinations as places that cannot be missed. The fourth step of the model, Action, never seems to be represented by this adjective.

3.1.9 ‘National’ The adjective ‘national’ does not demonstrate an interesting collocational profile as it is almost always used in names such as ‘National Trust’, ‘National Space Centre’, ‘National Botanic Garden’, ‘National Museum’, ‘(proper name) + National Park’. These names are mainly part of descriptions where readers are made aware of the presence of such attractions in the destination advertised or where the features of these attractions are described, such as in ‘In Wales, the National Botanic Garden of Wales is home to the world’s largest glasshouse’, or ‘The Snowdonia National Park is Wales’ oldest and largest national park’, and ‘The award-winning National Space Centre is the UK’s biggest attraction dedicated to space’. However, expressions containing the adjective ‘national’ also represent, although less frequently, the Desire and the Action steps as exemplified by the following instances extracted from the concordance: ‘Locomotive lovers won’t want to miss the National Railway Museum …’, ‘Discover Britain’s beautiful National Parks’.

Chapter Three

112

As expected, due to the intrinsic function of adjectives, the three most frequent adjectives in the VisBrit are predominantly used to promote Desire and to describe destinations and attractions as a must-see. However, the adjective ‘national’ is slightly more often embedded in expressions which incorporate the first two steps. Conversely, the Action step seems to make a rare use of these three adjectives to invite readers to act. At this point of the analysis, it is interesting to carry out a crosscomparison with the concordance results of the most frequent items of the other two corpora under examination. Results will reveal particular insights in terms of promotional strategies adopted by the three cultures.

3.2 Concordances in the VisIt The nine words analysed in the VisIt are the nouns provincia, città, territorio, the verbs offre, (si) trova, and perdere, and the adjectives grande, storico, and tipici (Table 3.2). TABLE 3.2. The three most frequent nouns, verbs and adjectives in the VisIt Item provincia (province) città (city) territorio (territory) offre (offers) (si) trova (is set) perdere (miss/lose) grande (great/big) storico (historic) tipici (typical)

Category noun noun noun verb verb verb adjective adjective adjective

% 0.34 0.32 0.27 0.11 0.10 0.07 0.17 0.12 0.12

3.2.1 Provincia (province) The most frequent noun in the VisIt is provincia (province) occurring with a percentage of 0.34%. The verbs it is frequently associated with are the verb essere (to be) in the 3rd person singular è (is – 16.5%), si trova (is located – 4%), si estende (extends – 4%), offre/offrono (offers/offer (3rd sing./1st pl.) – 4%), situata (situated – 2.2%). The presence of these verbs clearly suggests that provincia is included in descriptions which do not aim at inviting the reader to take action and to enjoy the activities which take place in the locations described; these descriptions rather aim to raise the reader’s Attention and Interest and to make the destination desirable by describing and listing the features of the area and what is available to

Concordances, Cultural Dimensions and Tourist Promotion

113

visitors, as can be seen in the following sentences: i meravigliosi e singolari paesaggi della provincia offrono infinite possibilità di passeggiate a piedi (the wonderful and unique landscapes of the province offer infinite possibilities of walks) and la provincia di Udine offre una gustosa gastronomia (the province of Udine offers a delicious cuisine). In 9% of the total instances, the noun is used to describe the location of destinations or of attractions: in these cases provincia collocates with nouns such as nord (north), est (east), ovest (west), settentrionale (northern), meridionale (southern), occidentale (western), such as nella zona sud-orientale della Provincia sorgono le Dolomiti Lucane (in the south-eastern area of the Province the Dolomites rise up). This usage clearly employs Attention and Interest. The collocates with which provincia is co-selected are varied and range from general names referring to places, such as centri (centres), località (resorts/places), capoluogo (county seat) to food, nature and so on.

3.2.2 Città (city/cities) The noun città occurs with a percentage of 0.32%. This noun is both singular and plural but no difference can be detected in terms of usage between the singular and the plural forms. For this reason, results from the concordances of the two forms will be considered together. In 16.5% of cases, the word città is preceded by adjectives. These adjectives can be grouped into four main semantic fields, which refer to ‘time’, such as antica/che (ancient), romana (Roman), moderna (modern), vecchia (old), to ‘beauty’, such as ricca (rich), belle (beautiful), magnifica (magnificent), splendida (wonderful), suggestiva (evocative/suggestive), to ‘popularity’, importante/i (important), famosa (famous), and to ‘size’, grandi (big), piccola (small). These adjectives illustrate both the Attention and Interest steps plus Desire as they emphasise the status, popularity, and attractiveness of the destination. The expression città d’arte (city/ies of art) occurs in 1% of the total instances. In 11% of the total instances, cities are described from a cultural and historical perspective as visible from the co-occurrence of città with nouns such as storia (history), monumenti (monuments), resti (remains), rovine (ruins), reperti (archaeological evidence), mura (city walls), centro storico (historic centre), patrimonio (heritage), chiese (churches), torri (towers), castello (castle). These descriptions aim at introducing the destination to potential visitors focusing on its history and traditions and thus utilise the first two steps of the model, Attention and Interest.

114

Chapter Three

The city is also described with reference to its centro (centre), vie (streets), rioni/quartieri (districts), dintorni (surroundings), and strade (roads) in 5% of the total instances. Other interesting collocates are nel cuore della città (in the heart of the city) or cuore della città sono followed by names of attractions (heart of the city are …), and the words simbolo and emblema (symbol/emblem), whose percentages of occurrence range from 2 to 2.5%. All these collocations tend to focus more on the status and the history of cities rather than on their attractions. For this reason, it can be assumed that this word, in both its singular and plural form, is more frequently used in the first two steps of promotion, Attention and Interest, and less frequently in the third step, Desire. It is never used in expressions which belong to the fourth step, Action.

3.2.3 Territorio (territory) This noun occurs with a percentage of 0.27%. The most frequent expressions in which territorio occurs (11%) are il/nel territorio di (the/in the territory of) followed by a proper noun of a city, such as il territorio di Firenze, and the expression il/nel territorio della provincia di followed by a proper name (the/in the territory of the province of + proper name). Other expressions are sparse/disseminati/presenti su (tutto) il territorio (scattered/disseminated/present on the (whole) territory) preceded by the semantic field of attractions such as monuments or nature reserves, and the expression itinerario/percorso alla scoperta del territorio (itinerary/path for the discovery of the territory). Both these expressions occur with the same percentage, 5%. These expressions employ the first two steps of the model, Attention and Interest, in that they make readers aware of the features of the destination. A frequent collocate of territorio (4.5%) is the adjective ricco (rich) which is used to qualify the features of the area, for example, in E’ uno splendido territorio ricco di pianure e canali (It’s a wonderful territory rich of plains and canals) and un territorio ricco di monumenti e memoria storica (a territory rich in monuments and historic memory). The adjective ricco not only describes the features of the destination but also adds an emotional perspective and starts the persuasion process by creating Desire. The verbs which collocate with territorio are a clear example of a type of promotion which mainly emphasizes Attention and Interest and less frequently Desire. They are always used in the Present indicative and are never used to address readers or to invite readers to take action. The most frequent verbs co-occurring with territorio are offre (3rd person singular – offers) with a percentage of 5.3%, si estende (3rd person singular –

Concordances, Cultural Dimensions and Tourist Promotion

115

extends) 2%, presenta (3rd person singular – presents) and propone (3rd person singular – proposes) both with a percentage of 1.4%, and the verbs ospita (3rd person singular – hosts) and comprende (3rd person singular – includes/consists of), both occurring in 1% of the total instances of territorio. The main elements of the area which are described and advertised are monuments, heritage, nature, reserves, food, festivals and traditions. The analysis of these three nouns confirms the results obtained with the frequency analyses carried out in the previous chapter. The tendency of the Italian promotion is that of emphasising more the cognitive stage of promotion where status, popularity, history and tradition of the destination are advertised. However, before jumping to conclusions more analyses are needed. In the following section, we will examine the concordances of the three most frequent verbs in the VisIt, namely offre, si trova, and perdere.

3.2.4 Offre (3rd person singular - offers) The verb offrire, particularly frequent in the 3rd person singular of the Present indicative offre (occurring with a percentage of 0.11%) has already been observed with the nouns provincia (province) and territorio (territory). The most frequent subjects of this verb include both generic and proper names referring to places and areas. Interestingly, in 8.5% of cases offer co-occurs with a category of people to whom what is offered is mainly addressed thus exhibiting the Desire step. Examples are: per/agli amanti del mare (for/to sea lovers), per/agli amanti dello sport (for/to sport lovers), a chi desidera + verb (to those who long for), a chi sceglie + verb/noun (to those who choose), al visitatore/ai visitatori (to visitor/s), al turista (to the tourist), which are used in sentences such as per gli amanti del mare la provincia offre 38 chilometri di costa (to nature lovers, the province offers 38 km of coastline) and L’Emilia Romagna offre al visitatore paesaggi mozzafiato (Emilia Romagna offers its visitor breathtaking views). The nouns which collocate more frequently with this verb belong to the semantic fields of Environment and Food. However, it is interesting to note the frequent presence of two nouns, that is to say possibilità (possibility/ies) and opportunità (opportunity/ies) co-occurring with this verb with a percentage of 22.5%. Some examples are la provincia di Arezzo offre diverse possibilità di vivere una vacanza all’aria aperta (the province of Arezzo offers several possibilities of living a holiday in the open air) and il litorale offre l’opportunità di trascorrere giornate in pieno

116

Chapter Three

relax al mare (the coastline offers the opportunity to spend relaxing days by the sea). These are clear examples of the Desire step: places are described as desirable by emphasising the presence of a wide range of possibilities and opportunities.

3.2.5 (Si) trova (is set) This verb occurs with a percentage of 0.10% and in 96% of cases it is used as a reflexive verb in the 3rd person singular of the Present Indicative, si trova (is set). It is used to describe the location of places and attractions, such in Proprio nella provincia di Foggia, si trova S. Giovanni Rotondo (Right in the province of Foggia, S. Giovanni Rotondo is set) and Il castello di Carlo V si trova nella parte più antica della città (The castle of Charles V is set in the most ancient part of the city). The collocational profile of this verb suggests that it is mainly used to promote the first two steps, Attention and Interest, and that it is never used to encourage Desire and to invite readers to take advantage of and enjoy the activities proposed.

3.2.6 Perdere (miss/lose) The verb perdere (miss/lose) in the Infinitive form occurs with a percentage of 0.07%. In 93% of cases this verb is embedded in the expression da non perdere (not to be missed/should not be missed) followed by the semantic field of attractions or of food, such as da non perdere una visita alla chiesa di S. Chiara (not to be missed a visit to St. Claire’s church), da non perdere la spettacolare Val di Susa (not to be missed the amazing Val di Susa valley), and gustosi e da non perdere anche i dolci natalizi (delicious and not to be missed [are] also Christmas sweets). In the remaining 7% of instances, perdere occurs with the modals possono (3rd person plural Pres. Ind– can) and vorranno (3rd person plural Fut. Ind. – want) and performs the same function as in the cases described above. Interestingly, in these cases the category of people who should not miss the attraction described is always mentioned. Examples are Gli amanti delle tradizioni non possono perdere le numerose feste e sagre (Tradition lovers can’t miss the several food festivals) and Gli amanti dell’arte non vorranno perdere l’occasione di ammirare i famosi Bronzi di Riace (art lovers won’t want to miss the occasion to admire the famous Riace Bronzes).

Concordances, Cultural Dimensions and Tourist Promotion

117

The collocational profile of perdere is very interesting because it suggests a predominantly persuasive function performed by this verb. The expressions in which it is embedded are examples of Desire but they also represent a covert invitation to take Action, which is very rare in this corpus. The three verbs analysed show many differences in terms of usage: si trova is only used to achieve Attention and Interest while perdere is a strategic item with a strong persuasive function. Conversely, offre, which is the most frequent of the three, shows a usage which mainly illustrates Attention and Interest but, to a certain extent, also Desire, due to its presence in expressions emphasising the attractiveness and the uniqueness of the place. The last three items of the VisIt under examination are the three most frequent adjectives: grande, storico, and tipici.

3.2.7 Grande (great/big) Grande (great/big) occurs with a percentage of 0.17%. This adjective has an interesting collocational profile because it is frequently used in expressions and collocations where its meaning mainly refers to ‘importance’ rather than ‘size’. It is frequently co-selected with abstract nouns in expressions such as di grande valore (of great value), di grande interesse (of great interest), di grande fascino (of great charm), di grande suggestione (of great beauty), di grande richiamo (of great acclaim), di grande rilievo (of great significance), di grande effetto (of great effect), di grande importanza (of great importance), di grande pregio (of great value). All these collocations taken together account for 28% of the usages of grande. These collocations describe the status, history and tradition of the destination and for this reason they are linguistic expressions of the first two steps, Attention and Interest. In 13% of instances, grande is used in the superlative form il più grande (the biggest/the most important) followed in some cases by d’Europa (in Europe) or del mondo (in the world), and by other nouns mainly referring to places. Another frequent collocation (7.5%) is grande varietà (great variety) followed by nouns such as luoghi (places), prodotti (products), paesaggi (views/landscapes). These collocations and those containing the superlative form of the verb describe the attractiveness of the destination and, for this reason, are expressions of the third step, Desire.

118

Chapter Three

3.2.8 Storico (historic) The adjective storico occurs with a percentage of 0.12%. In 56% of its total instances, it occurs in the collocation centro storico (historic centre) used in the description of cities. Other collocates are corteo (5% - parade), patrimonio (3% - heritage) and a variety of different nouns referring to attractions. Its usages can be considered to be an illustration of the first two steps, Attention and Interest.

3.2.9 Tipici (typical/local) This adjective in the plural masculine form occurs with a percentage of 0.12%. It is mainly used in association with the semantic field of food as visible from its most frequent collocates: prodotti (products/produce), piatti (dishes/recipes), dolci (sweets), sapori (flavours), antipasti (starters), vini (wines). Reference to tradition is considered a feature of the cognitive stage in which brand awareness is created. For this reason, this adjective and its collocations are strategically used to promote Attention and Interest. The three adjectives considered for analysis grande, storico and tipici linguistically express the first two steps of the model. Only the adjective grande also conveys the Desire step. This is an interesting result in promotional terms, because the Italian promotion tends to use more frequently those adjectives which can attract the readers’ Attention and Interest, rather than adjectives which overtly emphasise the attractiveness of the destination. This is an important distinguishing feature of the Italian promotion. The last group of analyses will be carried out in the VisAus.

3.3 Concordances in the VisAus The nine items analysed in the VisAus are the nouns ‘park’, ‘beach’, and ‘island’, the verbs ‘see’, ‘take’, and ‘visit’, and the adjectives ‘national’, ‘aboriginal’, and ‘great’ (Table 3.3).

Concordances, Cultural Dimensions and Tourist Promotion

119

TABLE 3.3. The three most frequent nouns, verbs and adjectives in the VisAus Item park beach island see take visit national aboriginal great

Category noun noun noun verb verb verb adjective adjective adjective

% 0.43 0.27 0.24 0.33 0.21 0.19 0.39 0.26 0.20

3.3.1 ‘Park’ The noun ‘park’ has a percentage of occurrence of 0.43%. It mainly occurs in proper names of parks, such as ‘Cleland Wildlife Park’ or ‘Royal National Park’. The presence of prepositions in its co-text, such as ‘on’, ‘in’, and ‘near’, suggests that the location of parks is an important element in the description of these attractions. In fact, in the VisAus parks are mainly presented as places where several activities can be enjoyed and experienced as confirmed by the high percentage of occurrence of the noun ‘park’ in Imperative clauses (47% of the total instances), such as in ‘Discover the wetlands and wildlife life of World Heritage-listed Kakadu National Park’. Conversely, in 21% of instances the noun is used in clauses where the features of the park and what it offers are described without a direct invitation to the reader to take action, as in the following example ‘There are monsoon rainforests in Kakadu National Park’. The modal ‘can’ is present in only 4% of the total instances while ‘will’ expressing certainty occurs with ‘park’ in 1% of instances (ex. ‘From here you can visit World-Heritage-listed Kakadu National Park’; ‘you’ll get sweeping views over Alpine National Park’). As results suggest, this word is predominantly used in expressions which illustrate the fourth step, Action. Some of its usages also include Desire and much less frequently Attention and Interest.

3.3.2 Beach The word ‘beach’ occurs with a percentage of 0.27%. In 50% of its instances, ‘beach’ is part of proper names, such as ‘Tangalooma Beach’ or ‘Sunrise Beach’.

120

Chapter Three

This noun is preceded by adjectives in only 5% of cases and, apart from ‘white’ which is relatively frequent, the other adjectives cannot be grouped into a single semantic field. The verbs it is more frequently associated with mainly refer to activities that can be enjoyed on or around the beach, such as ‘surf’, ‘swim’, ‘walk’, ‘ride’, ‘visit’, ‘spot’, ‘find’, ‘drive’, ‘fish’ and so on. Verbs are in the Imperative form in 50% of the total instances and in the Present form of the Indicative in 40% of its total instances. Conversely, verbs occurring with ‘beach’ are introduced by the modal ‘can’ only in 4.5% of instances, and by ‘will’ in 1% of cases. In the usage of this noun, the Action step seems to be predominant over the other three. In the sentences in which ‘beach’ is not co-selected with an Imperative, the noun is embedded in expressions which create Desire. Attention and Interest are much less frequent.

3.3.3 Island This noun occurs with a percentage of 0.24%. In 77% of the total instances, ‘island’ is part of proper names, such as ‘Whitsunday Island’. In 13% of instances, ‘island’ – both as a generic noun and as a proper name – is preceded by adjectives: the most frequent is the superlative ‘largest’, followed by ‘sand’ and ‘unique’. Other one-entry adjectives refer to its features, such as ‘coral’ or ‘rugged’, to the presence of people, ‘deserted’, ‘inhabited’, ‘uninhabited’, or to its beauty, ‘beautiful’, ‘idyllic’. The verbs which are frequently associated with this noun are ‘visit’, ‘walk’, ‘drive’, ‘ride’, ‘explore’, ‘surf’, ‘swim’, ‘sail’, and other verbs referring to other activities that can be enjoyed while on the island. Verbs are almost equally used both in the Imperative form (37%) and in the Present form (41%). The use of the modal ‘can’ is not very frequent (5%) as already noted for the previous nouns, and the auxiliary ‘will’ has only 3% of occurrence. Adjectives and verbs frequently co-occurring with this noun suggest that ‘island’ is used in expressions which predominantly encourage Desire and Action and much less frequently Attention and Interest. Results from the concordances of nouns are very interesting particularly if compared with the results obtained in the VisBrit and in the VisIt. In the VisIt the fourth step, Action, is absent and Attention and Interest are predominant. In the VisAus, the Action step is predominant, followed by Desire and much less frequently by Attention and Interest. However, a detailed comparison of the three types of promotion will be

Concordances, Cultural Dimensions and Tourist Promotion

121

carried out only after the last two analyses, namely of the three most frequent verbs and the three most frequent adjectives in the VisAus. The three most frequent verbs in the VisAus are ‘see’, ‘take’ and ‘visit’.

3.3.4 ‘See’ The verb ‘see’ occurs with a percentage of 0.33%. In 62% of the total instances it occurs in the Imperative form or in sentences where action on the part of the reader is directly prompted through the use of the Imperative. The association between the modal ‘can’ and ‘see’ occurs with a percentage of 15.5% and the modal ‘will’ shows a percentage of occurrence of 6%. Collocations with ‘may’ or ‘might’ occur in about 1% of the total instances. Only in 7% of cases is ‘see’ used in sentences whose aim is that of describing the features of the destination rather than inviting readers to action: in these cases ‘see’ occurs with ‘way/s’, as in ‘walking is the best way to see the city’s sandstone …’, and ‘place/s’ as in ‘it is one of the best places to see Australia’s nocturnal animals’. The expression ‘must-see’ which was frequently used in the VisBrit, here occurs in less than 1% of the total instances. The semantic preference of this verb is composed of the semantic fields referring to environment, art and culture. The former is much more frequent with a percentage of 75% and includes words referring to nature and wildlife while the latter shows an association with the verb in 22% of instances and mainly includes words such as ‘art’, ‘theatre’, ‘play’, ‘paintings’ and so on. Once again, the fourth step, Action, is predominant in the way ‘see’ is used in the VisAus. This verb is also used as a linguistic expression of the Desire step but is much less frequently used as an element of the Attention and Interest steps.

3.3.5 ‘Take’ ‘Take’ occurs with a percentage of 0.21%. Its most frequent collocates are ‘walk/stroll’ (6%), ‘flight’ (9%, such as ‘take a scenic helicopter flight’), ‘tour’ (4%), ‘ferry’ (3.5%), ‘cruise’ (3.5%), ‘trip’ (3.5%), ‘train’ (3%), ‘boat/catamaran’ (3%), ‘ride’ (2.8%). When ‘take’ is part of the phrasal verb ‘take in’ (in 15% of the total instances of ‘take’), the most frequent collocates are almost always ‘views’ and ‘sights’ while ‘take part in’ (3.2%) is always followed by the

122

Chapter Three

semantic field of food and cooking, such as ‘Take part in gourmet promotions …’, and ‘take on’ (2.8%) always collocates with ‘challenge’ and ‘adventure’. In 86% of its instances, ‘take’ is used in the Imperative form, in 7% of cases it is used in the Present tense as part of descriptions, and much less frequently with ‘can’ and ‘will’, namely 3% and 2%. The overwhelming presence of the Imperative form and the expressions in which the verb is embedded clearly suggest that ‘take’ is a linguistic device that, by addressing the readers directly, contributes to enhance the Action step.

3.3.6 ‘Visit’ ‘Visit’ occurs as a verb with a percentage of 0.19%. In 88% of cases, it is used in the Imperative form to invite readers to visit places and attractions. In 4% of cases ‘visit’ is preceded by ‘can’ and in the remaining 12% of instances this verb is used in sentences such as ‘the most popular time to visit is the dry season…’ where readers are not directly addressed. Its collocational profile is varied but all its collocates can be grouped into the semantic field of Attractions, such as ‘wineries’, ‘town’, ‘museums’, ‘galleries’, ‘park’ and so on. As already noted with the other two verbs, in the VisAus ‘visit’ is used to invite readers to action and, for this reason, it linguistically belongs to the fourth step of the model. Attention and Interest are also present but with a very low frequency. The three most frequent verbs of the VisAus are mainly used to persuade readers to take action. The other three steps of the model are also illustrated by their usage but with a much lower frequency of occurrence. The analysis of the Australian website continues with the three most frequent adjectives, that is to say ‘national’, ‘aboriginal’, and ‘great’.

3.3.7 ‘National’ The adjective ‘national’ is very frequent as it occurs with a percentage of 0.40%. As expected, the most frequent collocates (74.5%) of this adjective are proper names followed by the noun ‘park’, for example ‘National Kings Park’ or ‘National Ningaloo Marine Park’. In the remaining instances ‘national’ is followed by the noun ‘parks’, frequently occurring in sentences where the features of the area are described, such as ‘the area is also home to art galleries, wildlife sanctuaries, rolling

Concordances, Cultural Dimensions and Tourist Promotion

123

countryside, and national parks …’ or ‘the Indian Ocean Drive links white beaches, coral reefs, fishing towns, and national parks’. ‘National’ is mainly used to establish the Action step, but examples of its usage in the Attention and Interest steps and in the Desire step are also present.

3.3.8 ‘Aboriginal’ The adjective ‘aboriginal’ is also very frequent and has a percentage of occurrence of 0.26%. Its collocational profile is mainly comprised of nouns referring to art and culture: ‘art’ (17.5%), ‘culture’ (8%), ‘history’ (5%), ‘heritage’ (3.5%), ‘artist/s’ (3%), ‘site/s’ (2%), ‘artwork’ (1.7%), ‘artefacts’ (1.2%). Other semantic fields which occur less frequently in association with ‘aboriginal’ contain words such as ‘people’ (10%), ‘community’(2.8%), ‘tribe/s’(2.1%), ‘owners’ (1.2%) and words referring to tours, such as ‘guide’ (8%), ‘tour/s’ (3.2%), ‘experience/s’ (1.5%). The verbs which are frequently associated with all these collocations are ‘see’, ‘learn’, ‘discover’ and ‘browse’ mainly in the Imperative form. As suggested by the verbs frequently co-occurring with this adjective, the collocation in which it is embedded are part of sentences in which readers are invited to discover aboriginal art, culture and people. For this reason, most of the instances of ‘aboriginal’ belong to the fourth step, Action.

3.3.9 ‘Great’ The adjective ‘great’ occurs with a percentage of 0.20%. In most of its instances (51%) this adjective is part of proper names such as ‘Great Barrier Reef’ or ‘Great Ocean Road’. When it is not part of proper names it shows a highly varied collocational profile. The most frequent collocate is ‘place’ which, together with the synonymous noun ‘spot’, occurs in association with this adjective in 6% of its total instances. The other collocates range from a percentage of 2.2%, that is to say ‘food’, ‘outdoors’, ‘views’, ‘ways’ to a percentage of 1%, namely ‘significance’, ‘sharks’, ‘time’, and ‘base’. When ‘great’ is not used in proper names, it is used to describe the attractiveness and the desirability of the destination, and is thus part of the Desire step. The three most frequent adjectives of the VisAus show a usage which tends towards the last two steps of the model, Desire and Action, consistent with the features of the Australian promotion so far identified.

124

Chapter Three

In the following sections, results from the concordance analyses carried out above will be compared from both a linguistic and a cultural perspective. What is usual and typical in the three different languages and in the three types of promotion will also be interpreted according to the cultural model provided by Intercultural studies in order to identify possible cultural reasons at the basis of the different promotional strategies identified.

3.4 Comparing the three promotions Concordances from the three corpora have provided a detailed analysis of the specific usages of the words considered for linguistic investigation. Lexical, grammatical and semantic attractions have allowed us to carry out a systematic analysis of what is usual, normal and typical in the usage of the most frequent nouns, verbs and adjectives in the three corpora. In other words, results from concordances have strongly and more objectively contributed to the interpretation of the characteristic features of the British, Italian, and Australian tourist promotions. On the basis of the results of the three analyses described above, it can be assumed that once again there is a strong correspondence between the interpretation of the images used in the three websites, carried out in chapter one, and the results from the corpus analyses carried out above. The website www.visitbritain.co.uk adopts a type of promotion which makes a balanced use of the first three steps of the model and with a less frequent, but strategically used, direct invitation to take Action. Persuasion is, therefore, achieved through a combination of offer and demand. The website www.italia.it shows a tendency to advertise Italy as a tourist destination by focusing on the first two steps of the model, Attention and Interest. Destinations are promoted through descriptions and through reference to history, tradition, status and popularity. The appeal and the uniqueness of places and attractions are also part of the Italian promotion though they are not as frequent as the first two steps of the model. Persuasion is activated mainly through offer, and demand is never overtly communicated. The website www.australia.com makes a very marginal use of the first two steps, Attention and Interest. It tends towards a constant invitation to act, and places and destinations are presented as places to live and experience. Push and pull factors (Desire) are also strategically used even though less frequently than straightforward persuasion represented by the step Action. The relationship established with readers is, thus, mainly based on demand.

Concordances, Cultural Dimensions and Tourist Promotion

125

Before attempting to interpret differences and similarities from a cultural perspective, a further concordance analysis will be carried out. In particular, modal operators in the three corpora will be examined in their collocational profiles in order to check to what extent the modality expressed by modal operators contributes to the promotional aim of the three websites.

3.5 Modal verbs in the three corpora Modality refers to “the area of meaning that lies between yes and no – the intermediate ground between positive and negative polarity” (Halliday 1994, p. 356). It is expressed not only through Imperatives, Subjunctive and Indicative but also through modal operators, which is the category under examination in this section. As described in chapter one, when information is exchanged, the clause acquires the form of a proposition (usually expressed in the Mood choice of the Indicative). Propositions are something that can be argued because the information exchanged through them can be affirmed or denied. However, in between these two extremes there are a number of choices which express different degrees of probability or usuality. These intermediate positions constitute modalisation or epistemic modality. When goods and services are exchanged, the clause expresses some degree of obligation or inclination related to the speech functions of offer and command. In these cases, the clause acquires the form of a proposal and is an example of modulation or deontic modality. Modal operators are one of the possible elements of modality in the clause, the other being mood adjuncts, prepositional phrases and interpersonal metaphors. In this analysis, only modal operators will be considered in order to identify the type of modality used in the tourist promotion of the three countries. The list of modals is strictly limited to modal verbs, that is to say to those auxiliary verbs which allow subject-auxiliary inversion and allow negation with ‘not’. The modals analysed in the VisBrit and the VisAus are ‘can’, ‘could’, ‘may’, ‘might’, ‘must’, ‘should’, ‘will’ and ‘would’. The modal ‘shall’ has no entries in both corpora. The modals analysed in the VisIt are dovere, potere, volere and their conjugations.

Chapter Three

126

3.5.1 Modals in the VisBrit TABLE 3.4. Modals in the VisBrit Modals can could may might should will would

% 0.39 0.02 0.03 0.02 0.01 0.13 0.02

In the VisBrit corpus ‘can’ is almost always used in the affirmative form. In almost all instances, the subject of ‘can’ is the personal pronoun ‘you’. The most frequent verbs it is co-selected with are ‘see’, ‘enjoy’, ‘take’ mainly followed by words such as ‘trips’ ‘ride’, ‘find’, ‘stay’, ‘explore’, ‘watch’. Other less frequent verbs are ‘be’, ‘experience’, ‘visit’, ‘make’, ‘learn’, ‘get’, and ‘play’. With all these verbs, ‘can’ conveys an epistemic modality in that it refers to the high probability (tending towards certainty) of seeing and enjoying British attractions. The form ‘could’ is less frequent and apart from the personal pronoun ‘you’ as subject, it does not have other frequent co-selections in its collocational profile. The modal ‘may’ has, as its most frequent subjects, ‘you’, ‘it’, and nouns referring to places where accommodation is offered, such as ‘B&Bs’ usually followed by the verbs ‘have’ and ‘be’. ‘May’ can be thus considered another example of epistemic modal. ‘Might’ has the same frequency as ‘could’ and it is mainly used to express a low degree of probability. It also occurs in expressions such as ‘as you might expect’ and ‘than you might think’. Its subject is, in most cases, the personal pronoun ‘you’ and in its right co-text it is frequently co-selected with verbs referring to sight, such as ‘see’, ‘spot’, and ‘recognise’. Although running a concordance of ‘must’, the number of entries provided by the concordancing program equals 89, yet this item is used as a modal in only 3 cases. Two out of these entries use ‘must’ as a deontic modal in that they refer to some rules of the monarchy: ‘every sovereign must swear to uphold and protect the Anglican faith’ and ‘Members of both the Lords and the Commons must be present for the Queen’s speech’. In all the remaining instances, ‘must’ is used in expressions such as ‘top daytime must-do’s’, ‘top night time must-do’s’.

Concordances, Cultural Dimensions and Tourist Promotion

127

The modal ‘should’ is rarely used and does not show recurring patterns of usage, but in all its instances it is used as a device to give advice, such as in ‘Jazz fans should head to the Green Park Brasserie and Bar, …’. ‘Will’ is mainly used to convey a strong sense of high probability. It has an interesting collocational profile, particularly because its most frequently recurring subjects are ‘children’, ‘kids’ and ‘family’ which are almost always used in association with the verb ‘love’, such as in: ‘Your children will love the Bullpen indoor play area …’, ‘where your family will have a great time …’, and ‘so the kids will never get bored’. Other less frequent subjects are the pronoun ‘you’ and names of places or attractions. As for verbs, as stated above, the verb ‘love’ constitutes 25% of the associations between ‘will’ and a ‘verb’, followed by ‘be’ and ‘keep’. ‘Would’ does not have a percentage of occurrence which may suggest it plays an important role in the language of tourist promotion. Its collocational profile does not provide any recurring linguistic event apart from the expressions ‘as you/what else/everything you would expect’. Summarizing the results, the modals which play an important role in the language used in the www.visitbritain.co.uk website are ‘can’ and ‘will’. Both are epistemic modals: ‘can’ conveys the meaning of a high probability to see and enjoy something, and ‘will’ conveys a strong sense of certainty particularly related to children and families who will certainly appreciate what is offered to them.

3.5.2 Modals in the VisAus In order to identify the role played by modals in the website www.australia.com, the concordance analysis will consider the modals ‘can’, ‘could’, ‘may’, ‘might’, ‘must’, ‘should’, ‘will’ and ‘would’ in the VisAus (Table 3.5). A look at the frequency of occurrence of each of them suggests that, similar to what happens in the VisBrit, the modals which mostly contribute to the persuasive function are ‘can’ and ‘will’. However, their collocational profiles may suggest different usages and focus. The modal ‘can’, in almost all its instances, co-occurs with the personal pronoun ‘you’ as a subject. It collocates with a wide range of verbs which refer to activities and sometimes to attractions. The most frequent verb is ‘see’ (11%), followed by other verbs which all have the same frequency of occurrence (about 2%), such as ‘take’ (referring to taking means of transportation or referring to activities such as a ‘walk’), ‘swim’, ‘experience’, ‘enjoy’, ‘do’ (referring to doing an activity), ‘learn’,

128

Chapter Three

‘watch’, ‘go’, ‘dive’, ‘spot’ and so on. These co-selections suggest that, in the VisAus corpus, ‘can’ is used as an epistemic modal. TABLE 3.5. Modals in the VisAus Modals can could may might must should will would

% 0.47 0.01 0.03 0.02 0.02 0.02 0.09 (less than 0.01)

As in the VisBrit, ‘could’ has a low percentage of occurrence. The only recurring feature in its collocational profile is the personal pronoun ‘you’ as a subject. As for verbs, apart from ‘be’, the others are all single-entry verbs and, in many instances, they refer to activities. The modal ‘may’ shows a tendency to be co-selected with the personal pronoun ‘you’ in half of the instances. In the remaining instances, subjects vary from names of places, to shops, roads, activities, animals and so on. In almost all its instances, this modal is used as an epistemic modal and conveys different degrees of probability. ‘Might’ is less frequent but what is interesting about its collocational profile is that, in many instances, it is associated with verbs semantically referring to sight. Examples are ‘you might see a mass coral spawning turn the sea pink’ and ‘in winter you might spot whales gliding majestically by’. Here again, the meaning is that of an epistemic modal conveying a sense of median to low probability. ‘Must’ is, similarly, not very frequent and it is mainly used as a deontic modal, for example in ‘you must be aged between 18 and 30 years at the time of applying for your visa’, ‘golf gear must be neat casual’, and ‘drivers and passengers must wear seatbelts at all times’. Examples of ‘must do’ and ‘must see’ are present but are very few. ‘Should’ is used to describe what people should or should not do with different degrees of obligation from low to high such as ‘The experienced climber should have time for the three-hour round trip climb’ and ‘If bitten, you should seek immediate medical attention’. Therefore, it is used in all instances except one as a deontic modal. ‘Will’ shows a collocational profile which is very different from its British correspondent. It rarely collocates with nouns referring to children

Concordances, Cultural Dimensions and Tourist Promotion

129

or families and only in a few instances with verbs such as ‘love’. Conversely, the most frequent subject is ‘you’ and the most frequent verbs are ‘take’, ‘need’, ‘find’, and ‘be’. When ‘will’ is co-selected with ‘take’, it occurs in expressions where the subject is represented by a tour or a guide and the object is ‘you’, such as in ‘this three-hour walking tour will take you to Brisbane’ and ‘Local aboriginal guides will take you on a journey …’. When ‘will’ collocates with ‘need’ the subject is always ‘you’ and the object is almost always ‘permit’ or ‘visa’. ‘Find’ is associated with ‘will’ in sentences where the subject is ‘you’ and the object is ‘information’ as in ‘Here you will find some information on temperature’. In the VisAus, there are only 7 entries of ‘would’ and this means that it does not occur with sufficient frequency to say that it is a modal typically used in the language of the Australian website. Summarising the results, the analysis shows that, in the VisAus corpus, both epistemic and deontic modals are used, although epistemic modals are much more frequent. The two most frequent modals are ‘can’ and ‘will’ as in the VisBrit. However, while the former is similarly used, the latter shows a different usage. ‘Can’ is the modal which plays a very important role in this corpus and is mainly used to describe the activities which visitors will find and enjoy. ‘Will’ conveys the meaning of high probability tending towards certainty and is associated with verbs which mainly inform visitors about something they will find or need in Australia. In order to compare and contrast the results obtained from the VisBrit and the VisAus corpus, a similar analysis will be carried out in the VisIt corpus.

3.5.3 Modals in the VisIt There are only three modal verbs in Italian (Serianni 1988, p. 334-335; Dardano & Trifone 1997, p. 300), that is to say dovere (more or less corresponding to the meanings of ‘must’, ‘should’ and ‘have to’), potere (corresponding to the meaning of ‘can’ and ‘be able to’), and volere (corresponding to the meanings of ‘want’ and ‘would like’). These verbs express the modality of necessity, possibility and willingness. However, in order to compare the results obtained with those obtained in the VisBrit and in the VisAus corpora, verbs in the Future tense conveying the function of expressing certainty will also be considered. The verb dovere is almost absent in the VisIt corpus. The various forms of the verbs have been checked in all the persons (both singular and plural) but occurrences are absent or very low (no more than three times).

130

Chapter Three

The verb potere (can) is much more frequent with a percentage of 0.23%. The following forms have been found: possono (3rd person plural of the Present Indicative) and può (3rd person singular of the Present Indicative) which have a high frequency of occurrence, followed by less frequent forms such as potranno (3rd person plural of the simple Future Indicative), poter (present Infinitive), potrà (3rd person singular of the Simple Future Indicative), potete (2nd person plural of the Present Indicative). The collocational profile of the form possono reveals interesting patterns which are very different from those identified in the English counterparts. In 21% of its instances, the pattern is ‘(prep. + name of place/place adverbial) + si possono ammirare + (semantic field of attractions)’ where si possono ammirare corresponds to the impersonal form of the verb ammirare (admire). This impersonal form is always followed by names of attractions. Another verb which collocates with possono although with less frequency than ammirare is the verb seguire (follow - 9%). Similarly to the verb ammirare it is used in the impersonal form si possono seguire and it is followed by nouns such as itinerari (routes) and percorsi (routes/trails). The other verbs appearing in the collocational profile do not occur in many instances but they all belong to the semantic field of activities such as gustare (savour/taste), praticare (attività) (practice activities), trovare (find), trascorrere (spend), incontrare (meet). A similar collocational profile can be found for the 3rd person singular of the Present può. Here, the verb ammirare (admire) represents 11% of its collocations and is embedded in impersonal expressions very similar to those identified for the plural form possono. The other verbs co-selected with può refer to activities and attractions available, such as visitare (visit), scegliere (choose), raggiungere (reach), godere (enjoy) and so on. The only exception is the expression non (si) può mancare di functionally corresponding to the English ‘don’t miss/can’t be missed’ referring to visits to important attractions. The Future form potranno (in the 3rd person plural) collocates with the verbs ammirare (admire) and osservare (observe) which constitute 27% of its co-selections. Many of the other verbs of its collocational profile, although occurring only three times each, belong to the same semantic field, that of activities, which is here characterised by a high involvement of feelings, such as entusiasmarsi (get excited), provare l’ebbrezza (try the thrill), rivivere (live again), sperimentare (experience/experiment), rilassarsi (relax). The subjects of this verb form are various types of lovers, such as appassionati dello sci (ski lovers), appassionati di

Concordances, Cultural Dimensions and Tourist Promotion

131

birdwatching (birdwatching lovers), or appassionati di immersione (diving lovers). The Infinitive form poter has a very low frequency of occurrence but is used in a fixed pattern introduced by the place adverbial dove (where) or the place preposition in cui (in which) followed by poter and the semantic field of activities. The last two forms of the Italian modal potete and potrete have only 7 entries each. This shows that the direct address to readers (both forms are in the 2nd person plural) is quite unusual in the VisIt corpus. However, their usage is similar to those already seen in the other forms. These modals are used to describe the various possibilities visitors have during their trips all around Italy. The analysis proceeds with the three forms of the verb volere (want/would like) which are present in the VisIt corpus, that is to say vuole (3rd person singular of the Present Indicative), vogliono (3rd person plural of the Present Indicative), and vorranno (3rd person plural of the Simple Future Indicative). While the first of the three has a percentage of occurrence of 0.01%, the other two are very infrequently used, as suggested by their 6 and 3 entries. A look at the concordance of vuole suggests that in 60% of instances, it is used in the expression per chi vuole … (for those who want), followed by verbs referring to possibilities such as rilassarsi (relax), conoscere (learn/get to know), trascorrere (spend) and so on. Similarly, vogliono is always used in the expression coloro che vogliono (those who want) followed by the semantic field of activities. As stated above, in order to make a detailed comparison with the results achieved in the other two corpora, the Future forms of all the verbs in the VisIt corpus will be investigated by looking at the suffixes which form Future tenses, namely rò, rai, rà, remo, rete and ranno preceded by the asterisk symbol. The only two forms of the Future which are present in the VisIt corpus are the 3rd person singular rà and the 3rd person plural ranno, thus confirming what has previously been said about the absence of direct address in the Italian website. Verbs used in the 3rd person singular of the Future are many (0.03%) but apart from the Future of the verb to be (sarà) occurring 6 times, the other verbs do not occur more than three times and even when trying to group them into semantic fields, the results are not considered interesting and do not contribute to our analysis.

132

Chapter Three

The same can be said for the verbs in the 3rd person plural in the Future, where the only recurring verb is troveranno (will find) embedded in sentences such as gli amanti dello sci troveranno nella famosa Marcia Bianca … (ski lovers will find in the famous Marcia Bianca …) or gli amanti della storia, invece, troveranno molto interessante … (history lovers will find, instead, very interesting …). Summarizing the results, the modal which plays the most important role in the language of the VisIt corpus is potere (can) in the 3rd person singular and 3rd person plural of the Indicative (può – possono). What is interesting in its usage is the highly frequent presence of the verb ammirare (admire) which may be said to constitute a functional equivalent of the English verb ‘see’ which is one of the most frequent verbs coselected with ‘can’ in both the VisBrit and the VisAus. However, in Italian, ammirare (admire) is much preferred to its synonym vedere (see) which does not imply the meaning of stopping and observing with attention and interest someone or something that is astonishing and amazing. The verb ‘admire’ in both English corpora occurs only in ten instances thus revealing that it is not similarly used. Interestingly, vedere (see) in Italian is almost always used in the expression da vedere (to see/to be seen) frequently occurring at the beginning of sentences and it is not used as a possible activity offered to visitors. Therefore, it may be assumed that, in Italian, potere is used as an epistemic modal which conveys the certainty of admiring beautiful attractions in Italy. It should be said that, in the VisIt, the expression è possibile (it is possible) and the noun possibilità (possibility/ties) are frequent and are mainly used to describe the available activities that can be enjoyed by visitors, in association with verbs which are very similar to those identified for può and possono. Conversely, both in the VisBrit and in the VisAus, expressions such as ‘it is possible’ or the noun ‘possibility’ are almost never used. High probability in the VisIt corpus is also conveyed by verbs in the Future tense, although not very frequently. In conclusion, in the three corpora, the most frequent modal operators (‘can’, ‘will’ and potere) are epistemic modals which are used as linguistic devices to enhance the desirability of places. By describing what visitors will certainly, or can, find and do while visiting the destinations advertised, their usage strategically expresses the third step of the model, Desire. The interesting difference in the usage of modal operators between the VisBrit, the VisAus and the VisIt is the different level of formality of

Concordances, Cultural Dimensions and Tourist Promotion

133

the expressions in which modals are embedded. The highly frequent presence of the personal pronoun ‘you’ and the presence of concrete verbs such as ‘see’ reflect the dialogic nature of the British and Australian languages of tourism; conversely, the predominance of impersonal expressions containing modals in Italian combined with the frequent occurrence of the verb ammirare reflect a more formal type of language and a limited interaction. The analyses described in this chapter and in chapter two have provided an interpretation of corpus data from different perspectives. First, only as a source of statistic and quantitative information and second, as evidence of the social aspect of language. Corpus analyses have allowed us to analyse the language of tourism as it is actually used and show how persuasion is activated in the promotional process. All the analyses carried out in this chapter have consistently shown that the three websites have a different but systematic way of promoting tourism in the three countries. The website www.visitbritain.co.uk mainly focuses on culture, heritage and environment. Destinations and attractions are described and offered to visitors, who are also invited to experience and enjoy what is offered by means of direct address, invitational Imperatives, and informal language. Persuasion is, thus, activated through a balanced combination of offer and demand, Attention, Interest, Desire and overtly communicated Action. The Italian website has a different way of convincing readers to visit Italy. Readers are never invited through direct address, and impersonal forms are much preferred in the description of places. Descriptions are strategically developed to attract the potential visitors’ Attention and Interest by presenting destinations and attractions as desirable and unique places with plenty of opportunities and possibilities for enjoyment. Action is never directly prompted and it is up to the readers to decide between the several possibilities provided and offered. Persuasion is not overtly communicated by the website but it originates in the readers on the basis of what they read and see on the website. The Australian website is characterized by constant invitations to take advantage of the activities proposed, thus using a type of direct persuasion. Destinations are described not as something which exists and can be seen but as the starting point or the destination of a number of activities, from walking to hiking and climbing. Imperatives are highly frequent and promotion turns almost exclusively around what is offered by the

134

Chapter Three

Australian environment. Descriptions aim to create Desire and to prompt Action systematically. These three examples of tourist promotion, however, cannot be considered only as three different ways of using language. Conversely, they reveal three different socio-cultural approaches which can be properly interpreted only if combined with the broader context of culture of each country. These aspects will be analysed in detail in the following section.

3.6 Cultural dimensions, language and advertising The cultural interpretation of data has been carried out only as a final step to limit the risk of conducting a too subjective interpretation of results and to avoid that already existing theories and models may influence concluding generalisations. Furthermore, an analysis which does not start from data, particularly when language is at stake, is more likely to miss some important features which cannot appear unless a quantitative analysis is also carried out. In global advertising research, understanding the cultural values of consumers is of utmost importance (Taylor, 2005, 2007; Hofstede and de Mooij, 2010, 2011). Consumers are central together with their self, their personality, identity, image and cultural values. Besides that, mental and social processes are also relevant factors to take into account, that is to say how people think, learn, perceive and process information, and how people relate to each other, including motivation and emotions (Hofstede and de Mooij 2010, p. 86). These processes affect advertising style and appeal. Cross-cultural advertising should therefore start from an analysis of the culture’s consequences for the self and personality, mental and social processes, and how these influence global advertising strategy (ibid., p. 87). One of the ways to reach this goal is applying the theories of cultural models to advertising (Hofstede, 1980, 2001; Hofstede and de Mooij, 2010). The manifestations of culture, which are defined as ‘cultural dimensions’ by Hofstede (2001; Hofstede and de Mooij 2010, p. 88-90), and which are considered here in order to interpret corpus data, are five: Power Distance, Individualism/Collectivism, Masculinity/Femininity, Uncertainty Avoidance, and Long-/Short-term Orientation. Power distance (PD) is defined as the extent to which the less powerful members of organizations and institutions (such as the family) accept and expect that power is distributed unequally. Based on the level of expectation, this distance can be defined as high or low. In cultures with a

Concordances, Cultural Dimensions and Tourist Promotion

135

high Power Distance there is a strong sense of social hierarchy and of social status and power is centralized. Cultures with a low Power Distance do not have a relationship of dependence on superiors and authorities but rather a relationship of interdependence. They all work together to solve problems, and exchanges of different points of view are more than appreciated. According to a survey conducted by Hofstede2, the UK scores low on this dimension, more precisely 35 out of 100. This means that the British society believes that inequalities amongst people should be minimized. As for Italy, the survey has involved only northern Italy and if southern Italy were included, the PD score would probably be higher than 50. Many studies (Katan, 2004; Manca, 2012, 2013; de Mooij, 2004) have shown that Italian culture tends to be a high PD culture which considers social hierarchy and status as very important. Australia scores low on this dimension (36 out of 100) as visible in business domains, where hierarchy is established for convenience, superiors are always accessible and managers rely on individual employees and teams for their expertise. Information is shared frequently and is informal, direct and participative3. The influence of this cultural dimension on language is visible, for example, on a more or less dialogic style and formal or informal style of communication. Low Power Distance cultures show a higher interaction in language, which may be characterised for example by salutations and engagement markers such as ‘you’ or ‘yours’, a use of Imperative forms and of questions which convey the impression of a dialogue, the use of vague language, which is typical of conversations among friends, exclamation and suspension marks which represent some features of speech (Cucchi 2015, p. 27). The second cultural dimension is represented by the contrast between Individualism/Collectivism (IDV/COLL) and reflects the degree to which individuals are integrated into groups. In individualistic societies, everyone is expected to look after him- or herself and his/her immediate family. These cultures are I-conscious and universalistic and tend to assume that their values are valid for the whole world. Conversely, in collectivistic cultures, relationships among individuals are very strong and people tend to be integrated in strong cohesive in-groups that look after

2 Hofstede’s model is based on quantitative research and gives scores for 75 countries and regions. Dimensions are measured on a scale from 0 to 100 and results are described and detailed on the website geert-hofstede.com from which scores have been taken. 3 https://geert-hofstede.com/australia.html (accessed May 2016)

136

Chapter Three

themselves in exchange for loyalty. These cultures are we-conscious and their identity is based on the system they belong to. The UK is among the nations with the highest scores on Individualism (89 out of 100). For this reason, the British can be considered highly individualist and private people4. As for Italy, different tendencies between the northern and southern parts of the country should be noted: the score accredited to northern Italy is 76, but this dimension may vary in the south where the family network and the group one belongs to are important social aspects, and rituals such as weddings or Sunday lunches with the family are occasions that cannot be missed5. The Australian culture scores 90 on this dimension and this translates into a loosely-knit society in which the expectation is that people look after themselves and their immediate family6. In terms of language, individualistic cultures adopt a more direct style of communication, placing more emphasis on facts and concreteness; collectivistic cultures tend to adopt a more indirect style of communication, placing more emphasis on how things are said. The direct style of individualistic cultures may even sound offensive to members of collectivistic cultures, and for this reason much care should be taken when dealing with communication across cultures with different orientations. In advertising, this difference is reflected in the dichotomy persuasion vs. trust: in individualistic cultures, persuasion has to be direct and get to the point fast; in collectivistic cultures, a relationship of trust should be created first in order to sell a product. This dimension can be combined with Hall’s (1976; 1984) patterns of culture, in particular the pattern related to Context. The concept of Context explains cultural differences in terms of directness of communication and information load. Different cultures have differing priorities with regard to how much information needs to be made explicit in communication (Katan 2004, p. 245). In High Context cultures, how something is said is more important than what is actually said and very little is made explicit as part of the message. Conversely, in Low Context cultures explicit verbal messages are more important than the intended meaning. Low-context communication cultures demonstrate positive attitudes towards words, argumentation and rhetoric, whereas High-context communication cultures tend to be characterized by symbolism or indirect verbal expressions (de Mooij 2004, p. 182). Hofstede suggests a correlation between collectivism and High Context in cultures (ibid.). In collectivistic cultures, information 4

https://geert-hofstede.com/united-kingdom.html (accessed May 2016) https://geert-hofstede.com/italy.html (accessed May 2016) 6 https://geert-hofstede.com/australia.html (accessed May 2016) 5

Concordances, Cultural Dimensions and Tourist Promotion

137

flows more easily among members of groups and there is less need for explicit communication than in individualistic cultures. The third dimension identified by Hofstede is Masculinity vs. Femininity (MAS/FEM): the dominant values in a masculine society are achievement and success; the dominant values in a feminine society are caring for others and quality of life. Masculine values are assertiveness, competitiveness, achievement, task orientation, and resolution of conflict by confrontation. Feminine values are modesty, caring, conflict resolution through compromise and negotiation. The UK scores 66 on this dimension and can be considered a Masculine society, highly success-oriented and driven. Italy is also a Masculine society with a score of 70. Success has to be shown by acquiring status symbols (such as cars, houses, …) and competition among colleagues for pursuing a career can be very strong7. Australia scores 61 on this dimension. Although this score is lower than the other two, it can be assumed that this culture also has a Masculine society driven by competition, achievement and success. The fourth dimension is Uncertainty Avoidance (UA), that is to say the extent to which people feel threatened by uncertainty and ambiguity and try to avoid these situations. The need for rules and formality to structure life is typical of cultures with high Uncertainty Avoidance. Conversely, openness to change and innovation are typical of low Uncertainty Avoidance cultures. The UK has a very low score on this dimension (35 out of 100). This means that the British are comfortable in ambiguous and unplanned situations. Italy has a high score on Uncertainty Avoidance (75 out of 100) and this means that the Italian culture does not feel comfortable with unknown situations. This is why formality is important and, for example, the Italian penal and civil codes are very complicated and full of clauses and codicils8. The Australian culture is characterised by an intermediate UA, scoring 51. In terms of language, this dimension implies that there is a more or less prominent emphasis on the linguistic expression of concepts such as expectation of assurance that is reflected in items expressing certainty, on value conservatism and on traditional beliefs (Singh and Pereira 2005, p. 101). These are expressed by items referring to history and tradition, and on health aspects reflected in the attitude towards relaxation or activity or in the importance of purity, for example in food and drink (Hofstede and de Mooij, 2010). 7 8

https://geert-hofstede.com/italy.html https://geert-hofstede.com/italy.html

138

Chapter Three

The fifth and last dimension analysed here is Long-Term Orientation (LTO) vs. Short-Term Orientation (STO), which corresponds to the extent to which a society exhibits a pragmatic future-oriented perspective rather than a conventional historic or short-term point of view. Characteristics of LTO cultures are persistence, ordering relationships by status, thrift, having a sense of shame. Features of STO cultures are: respect for tradition, personal steadiness and stability, reciprocation of greetings, favours, and gifts. The UK scores 51 on this dimension and, for this reason, a dominant preference cannot be determined. According to Hofstede, Italy tends to be a long-term orientation culture with a score of 61. From this perspective, Italy is described as a very pragmatic culture in which people believe that truth depends very much on the situation and are able to adapt traditions to changed conditions9. Australia scores 21 on this dimension and, for this reason, is considered a normative culture. People in such societies have a strong concern with establishing the absolute Truth and exhibit great respect for traditions.

3.7 A cultural interpretation of results The cultural dimensions analysed above seem to explain quite clearly most of the differences and similarities which result from the analyses carried out. Let us start with the interpretation of the high/low interaction which characterises the three websites. In order to do this, three dimensions should be considered together: Power Distance, Uncertainty Avoidance and Individualism. As already stated above, the UK scores low on PD and UA and high on IDV, while Australia scores low on PD, has an intermediate score on UA and scores very high on IDV; Italy scores high on all of the three dimensions. These different scores explain the distinction that exists between the direct style of communication which characterises the Australian and the British websites and the indirect style of communication of the Italian website. Gudykunst and Ting-Toomey (1988) and de Mooij (2004) distinguish between verbal personal and verbal contextual style, and between elaborate, exacting and succinct verbal style. According to them, countries with a high index of PD and UA (such as Italy) tend to use an elaborate verbal contextual style, rich in expressive language, metaphors, adjectives and flowery expressions, and a more indirect style. This 9

https://geert-hofstede.com/italy.html

Concordances, Cultural Dimensions and Tourist Promotion

139

explains the absence of Imperative forms in the VisIt, the preference for indirect and impersonal expressions, and the frequent usage of words such as possibilità (possibilities) and opportunità (opportunities) in the description of destinations and attractions. The language used in the Italian website aims to create a relationship of trust with readers with descriptions which attract the readers’ Attention and Interest and stimulate their Desire. For this reason, persuasion is a consequence of this relationship in which readers are never invited or prompted to take Action. The decision to visit the destinations advertised is not taken because someone has suggested that they do so, but because descriptions strategically meet the needs and desire of Italian readers. Countries with a low index of PD and UA and a high score on IDV, such as the UK and Australia are characterised by a verbal personal style. This style is person-oriented and neither more nor less information than required is given; this is why this style is also defined exacting style (Gudykunst and Ting-Toomey, 1988; de Mooij, 2004). High scores on Individualism imply the frequent use of personal pronouns such as ‘you’ and ‘we’ (ibid.). These features explain the more direct and interactional style which characterises the British and Australian websites, the use of Imperative forms, of the personal pronoun ‘you’ and the use of more colloquial tones. For this reason, the language used in the British and the Australian websites aims to get straight to the point: no relationship of trust needs to be first created, readers are persuaded through information and facts rather than through abstract descriptions of positive feelings. The Individualism dimension also explains the different usages in terms of the frequency of the word ‘family’. In the VisBrit, this word occurs with a percentage of 0.22% (adding up its occurrences as an adjective and as a noun), while in the VisIt the literal equivalent famiglia has a percentage of 0.01%; in the VisAus ‘family’ occurs with a percentage of 0.03%. Because the UK is an individualistic culture, the high frequency of this word in the VisBrit could be considered anomalous. However, as noticed by Hofstede and de Mooij (2010, p. 103), the high usage of this word may be interpreted as a reflection of individualism where people are afraid that family values are disappearing. In the VisIt, families are almost never at the centre of promotion probably because the family is part of the Italian identity. The UA dimension also provides a cultural interpretation of the frequencies of the concepts of tradition, health and purity. Italy is a high UA culture and this is reflected, for example, in the high frequency of words such as tradizione (tradition) and tradizionale

140

Chapter Three

(traditional - and its declensions) which reveal a past-oriented attitude of the Italian culture, as if the past were a safe haven which can limit the presence of unknown situations. The literal English equivalents of these items have a percentage of 0.08% in the VisBrit and 0.07% in the VisAus thus revealing a more present- or future-oriented attitude. However, the low score of the Australian website on the LTO dimension explains the high frequency of the adjective ‘aboriginal’ in the VisAus since low scores on this dimension imply respect for tradition (opposed to conservatism related to the UA dimension). As pointed out by Hofstede and de Mooij (2010, p. 90), high UA cultures have a passive attitude to health, for example, by focusing on purity in food and drink whereas low UA cultures have a more active attitude to health by focusing on fitness and sports. This seems to explain the frequent usage of the word natura (nature) in the VisIt with respect to its literal equivalent in the other two corpora. As noticed in chapter two, natura is described as a source of pleasure and relaxation as suggested by the frequent expressions a stretto contatto con la natura (in strict contact with nature) and immerso/i nella natura (immersed in the nature). This latter expression conveys an idea of purification through immersion, clearly related to the concept of Baptism. The same concept is absent or very rarely used in the other two corpora. Purity in food and drink is combined with conservatism in the VisIt: local produce and recipes are traditional and, for this reason, they are pure because they are prepared without using chemicals or modern domestic appliances such as an electric oven. As for activities, the VisIt frequently uses generic words to refer to them, such as visita (visit), percorso/i (route/s), itinerari (itineraries), escursioni (excursions) and the only verb referring to physical activities is praticare (practice), always used in the Infinitive form and in expressions such as possibilità di praticare (sport) (possibilities to practice sports) and è possibile praticare sport (it is possible to practice sports) where no direct invitation is extended to readers to take advantage of the sports facilities which are present in the area. The idea of relaxation has a very low frequency in the VisBrit and verbs referring to eating and relaxing are at the bottom of the list: ‘relax’ occurs with a percentage of 0.05% and other semantically similar verbs such as ‘unwind’ or ‘have a rest’ are very rarely used. Nouns referring to activities are more specific with respect to the VisIt, and the group of verbs with the highest frequency of occurrence in the VisBrit (0.9%) is the one referring to visiting and experiencing. The semantic field of Food in the VisBrit has a very low frequency of occurrence and is never related, as

Concordances, Cultural Dimensions and Tourist Promotion

141

expected on the basis of the UK’s low scores on UA, to tradition and purity. Similar to what happens in the VisBrit, the idea of relaxation has a low frequency in the VisAus: as already noticed in chapter two, 40 out of the 54 verbs included in the first 425 words of the VisAus wordlist clearly refer to activities that can be done by visitors, from just seeing or visiting a place to something more demanding such as surfing, diving, and climbing. These verbs are almost always used in the Imperative form to invite readers to visit Australia and to enjoy the activities advertised. Furthermore, the semantic field of nouns referring to Activities comes as third in the VisAus: this result, combined with the frequencies of verbs referring to activities, reveals a very active attitude to health focused on sports. However, this attitude does not depend entirely on the UA dimension since Australia scores 51 on this dimension and is, therefore, in an intermediate position. It may also depend on the tendency of the Australian culture (which is a Low-Context culture) to convey facts in a straightforward way and on the highly dialogic style of promotion which aims to immediately persuade the reader through a focus on what can best be enjoyed in Australia. In cross-cultural communication with advertising aims, these cultural aspects should be at the basis of any model: if some features are very common and frequently used by a culture it means that they are effective and their presence contributes to a more positive disposition on the part of the consumers towards the products advertised. In the following chapter, the English and the Italian translations available on the three websites under examination will be analysed and an investigation of how the specific features of each culture have influenced the search for equivalence will be conducted and described.

CHAPTER FOUR TRANSLATION AND TOURIST PROMOTION ACROSS LANGUAGES AND CULTURES

The three websites considered for analysis in the previous chapters have shown to be complex products where layout, colours, images, texts and slogans are strategically combined together in order to achieve the final aim, that is to say promoting a country and persuading readers to become tourists. As suggested by Manca (2013), the creation of a promotional website for tourist products is far from being an easy task. In fact, the target of tourist promotion is almost always international and multicultural, and this involves the presence of several cultural determinants in the promotion process (see Cappelli, 2007). Ethnocentricity is always a risk in cross-cultural marketing activities, because those strategies that are successful in one country (or within a culture) do not always work abroad or in a different culture (see Prime, 2003). This is confirmed by the several differences identified both through the multimodal and the corpus analyses carried out in the previous chapters: the three countries tend to use different strategies to advertise their destinations and attractions by preferring, for example, to emphasize the environment rather than culture and heritage or by focusing more on those descriptions that may draw the readers’ Attention and Interest rather than their Desire and Action, or further still, by addressing readers through the Imperative form rather than using impersonal forms and expressions. These considerations should guide the translators of tourist products in their hard task of making content accessible and successful among a new audience. The type of equivalence translators should seek to establish should consider the final aim or purpose of tourist products, which is persuading readers to visit the destination advertised. The product should, therefore, be re-shaped according to the linguistic and socio-cultural features of the target audience. However, the source text/product cannot be completely dethroned in favour of the target text/product. For example, the frequent reference to the importance of tradition and past times in Italian tourist websites (see Manca, 2012; 2013) could be perceived as ‘foreign’ and

Translation and Tourist Promotion across Languages and Cultures

143

consequently attractive to potential British tourists even though the promotion of British tourist destinations does not focus on and give importance to similar cultural aspects. The situation is further complicated if another factor is taken into account: the English language is used not only to address potential British tourists but also people from other English-speaking countries or people who read the website contents in English because that is the only language they understand among those available on the website. The relationship is of one language to many (and rather different) cultures thus making the choice of linguistic and cultural strategies even more difficult. The websites considered for analysis provide foreign readers with several translated versions of the original contents. The website www. visitbritain.co.uk is translated into Chinese, Italian, Russian, Spanish, Japanese, German, French and Portuguese. The website www.italia.it is translated into English, German, French and Spanish, and the Australian website into Chinese, Japanese, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. The presence of these translations, therefore, indicates that the type of promotion used to advertise the three countries aims to address a larger audience than the domestic one. The analysis proposed in this chapter will consider the Italian translations available on the British website www.visitbritain.co.uk and on the Australian website www.australia.com and the English version provided by the Italian website www.italia.it. Three parallel corpora have been assembled by downloading the above mentioned translated texts1: a corpus containing the Italian translations of the British website (which will henceforth be referred to as VisBrit_T), a corpus containing the English translations of the Italian website (hence VisIt_T), and a corpus containing the Italian translations of the Australian website (hence VisAus_T). These three corpora will be analysed and compared with the three nontranslational corpora (VisBrit, VisIt, and VisAus) in order to identify what kind of equivalence has been preferred in the translated versions and whether the strategies of promotion used by translators have re-shaped the final product by taking into account the features of the receiving language and culture. Prior to that, a brief overview of the concept of equivalence and of the main features of the translation process will be provided in the following section.

1

Texts were downloaded in a period ranging from March to May 2015.

144

Chapter Four

4.1 Equivalence in the translation process The notion of equivalence has been thoroughly discussed among scholars over the years, even though there is no general agreement on the definition of equivalence and on how equivalence should be established. Generally speaking and following Pym (2010, p. 7) equivalence can be interpreted as a relation of equal value between the source and the target texts. This value may be on the level of form, of reference, or of function. The several theories on equivalence are grouped by Pym (2010) into three main paradigms: natural equivalence, directional equivalence, and purpose. The first of the three paradigms, natural equivalence, includes those theories which presume that “things of equal value” exist prior to the act of translation (ibid., p. 6). This kind of equivalence is considered natural and is opposed to the second paradigm which sees equivalence as directional, that is to say as a result of active decisions made by translators and not as a natural or reciprocal relation (Pym 2010, p. 24). The difference between the two paradigms is that while natural equivalence remains the same whether translated from language A into language B or the other way around (Pym 2010, p. 7), directional equivalence describes a process which goes from one side to the other but not back again (Pym 2007, p. 277). An example of natural equivalence is the one provided by Vinay and Darbelnet (1958, p. 19), who suggested that the English ‘slow’ on a road sign should be translated in French with ‘ralentir’ rather than with ‘lentement’. This equivalence is what different languages and cultures produce from within their own systems (Pym 2007, p. 279). According to Vinay and Darbelnet (1958/1972, p. 55), among the different strategies that can be used to achieve natural equivalence, only transposition, modulation, correspondence, and adaptation can be considered as highly naturalistic and worth considering. All these strategies imply the presence of a function or of a message that stands outside all languages, the so-called tertium comparationis, an element of comparison available to both sides (Pym 2010, p. 18). Conversely, strategies such as loan, calque, and literal translation are directional and may be possible causes of unnatural results (see Pym 2007, p. 280; 2010, p. 13-14). Theorists of directional equivalence do not list strategies but different types of equivalence achieved on the basis of translators’ choice whether to render one aspect or another of the source text. Nida (1964), for example, theorised the existence of two different kinds of equivalence: formal equivalence and dynamic equivalence. The former refers to a ST-oriented type of equivalence, where original form and content are preserved, whereas the latter refers to a more functional

Translation and Tourist Promotion across Languages and Cultures

145

equivalence which reproduces “in the receptor language the closest natural equivalent of the source-language message” (Nida and Taber 1969, p. 12). Further examples of directional equivalence are Newmark’s semantic and communicative translation (1988), House’s overt and covert translation (1997), Nord’s documentary and instrumental translation (1997), Toury’s adequate and acceptable translations (1980), Venuti’s fluent and resistant translations (1995). What all these theories have in common is a tendency towards foreignizing (as in overt, documentary, adequate, or resistant translations) or domesticating (as in covert, instrumental, acceptable, or fluent translations). It is up to the translator to choose the strategy he/she deems more valid to achieve his/her aim in the translation process. Another group of theories that have generally been opposed to the equivalence paradigm (Pym 2010, p. 43) and, for this reason are included by Pym in the third paradigm, purpose, sees translation from an alternative perspective: although they focus on the purpose of translation, these theories accept that source texts may be translated in different ways in order to carry out different functions. These theories have in common the idea that translators should work to achieve a communicative purpose (Skopos), rather than just follow the source text (Pym 2010, p. 44) and to translate functions of texts rather than words on a page. The purpose of translation is thus not the repetition of the function of the source text, which could well be a relation of equivalence, but rather giving priority to the target-side purpose to be fulfilled by the translation (ibid., p. 44). This break with the equivalence paradigm started with Reiss (1971; Reiss and Vermeer, 1984), Vermeer (1989) and Holz-Mänttäri (1984). The type of equivalence or of relation between source and target texts discussed in this book cannot be ascribed solely to one of the three paradigms briefly described above. However, the starting point is undoubtedly functional: translating tourist texts means both conveying meanings across two different languages and cultures and creating an equivalent source text effect which is successful in terms of persuasion among the target audience (Manca, 2012).

4.2 Comparing originals, translations and non-translated texts: translation universals The analyses which will be carried out in this chapter aim to identify the features of the English and Italian translated texts available on the three websites. The analyses will compare translated texts and their originals, and translated texts and non-translated comparable texts. The

Chapter Four

146

results of these analyses will help understand what kind of adaptation has been carried out by translators and how the persuasive function has been or not been kept intact in the translation process. According to Pym (2010, p. 66), the most obvious way to analyse translations is to view the source and target texts as sets of structures. The structural differences between translations and their sources may be described as translation shifts, that is to say “departures from formal correspondence” (1965, p. 73). According to Baker (1993, p. 243) the features which typically occur in translated texts rather than in original utterances are not the result of interferences from specific linguistic systems but are features which are inherent to the process of translation. These typical features of translation have been differently defined: Toury (1995) calls them ‘laws’ while Baker (1993) talks about ‘translation universals’. Translation universals have been distinguished by Chesterman (2004; 2010, p. 40ff) into two groups: S-universals and T-universals. An S-universal is related to a difference between translations and source texts while a T-universal generalizes about typical differences between translations and non-translations in the target language. Potential S-universals are: -

-

-

Lengthening. Translation tends to be longer than their source texts. This hypothesis is strictly related to the linguistic features of the languages concerned in the translation process (Vinay and Darbelnet, 1958). Interference. Translations tend to manifest interference from the source text (Toury, 1995). Standardization. Translations tend to display a more standardized style than the original (Toury, 1995). Dialect normalization. Translations tend to normalize dialects (Englund Dimitrova, 1997). Reduction of complex narrative voices. In translated texts the form of the Free Indirect Speech tends to be shifted to reported discourse (Taivalkoski-Shilov, 2006). Explicitation. Translations tend to be more explicit than their original (Blum Kulka, 1986; Klaudy, 1996). The retranslation hypothesis. Later translations of a given work into a given target language tend to get closer to the source text. Reduction of repetition. Translations tend to have fewer repetitions than their original (Baker, 1993).

Translation and Tourist Promotion across Languages and Cultures

147

Potential T-universals are (Chesterman 2004, p. 39-40): -

-

Simplification. Translations show less lexical variety, less lexical density, and a higher proportion of high-frequency items (LaviosaBraithwaite, 1996). Conventionalization. Translations tend towards more conventional usage (Baker, 1993). Untypical lexical patterning. Translated texts tend to have an untypical usage of words (Mauranen, 2000). Under-representation of TL-specific items. Translations tend not to use target language items that are formally very different from a given source-language (Tirkkonen-Condit, 2004).

The analysis of the features of the translated texts in the VisBrit_T, VisIt_T and VisAus_T will start with a contrastive corpus analysis where units from translational and non-translational corpora will be identified, compared and contrasted. Descriptions of differences and similarities of usages of similar words and phrases will be followed by generalisations on translation universals referred to as the typical features of the translation process from and into Italian and English in the language of the websites selected for analysis. Furthermore, alternative translation units will be provided on the basis of data from non-translational corpora in order to guide translators towards the achievement of more acceptable translations both from a linguistic and cultural perspective.

4.2.1 Identifying the features of the VisIt_T The analysis starts with the VisIt_T corpus, made up of the English version of the Italian texts available on the website www.italia.it. The statistics provided by Wordsmith 6.0 give us an interesting figure, the Standard Type Token Ratio (see chapter two), which allows us to identify the lexical features of the translated corpus. The STTR of the VisIt_T is 48.85. This figure is higher than the STTRs of the two English non-translational corpora, the VisBrit and the VisAus, having namely 45.28 and 45.83 (Table 4.1). The STTR of the VisIt_T is, however, lower than that of the VisIt, which is 52.38. These figures seem to suggest that the language used in the translated texts still retain some lexical features of the source language.

Chapter Four

148

TABLE 4.1. STTRs of the VisIt_T, VisBrit, VisAus, and VisIt

STTR

VisIt_T 48.85

VisBrit 45.28

VisAus 45.83

VisIt 52.38

A look at the wordlists of the VisIt_T, VisIt and VisBrit may help give a closer insight into the nature of the translated language. The reason why these three wordlists are compared is to check and compare word frequencies and usage in target texts against their correspondents or equivalents in source texts and in non-translated English texts which deal with similar topics and have a similar communicative function. For lack of space, only the first twenty words of the wordlist of each corpus will be taken into account (Table 4.2). Although this approach may not be exhaustive enough to make generalizations about strategies and types of equivalence, it is however a starting point which provides interesting insights into the features of translated texts, as we will see in the analyses described below. Items with mismatch in frequency are highlighted in bold in Table 4.2. TABLE 4.2. First 20 content words of the VisIt, VisIt_T and VisBrit VisIt provincia (province) città (city) territorio (territory) san (saint) mare (sea) terra (land) centro (centre) parco (park) grande (big/great) natura (nature) museo (museum) storia (history) arte (art) zona (zone/area) parte (part) palazzo (palace) castello (castle) chiesa (church) storico (historic) tipici (typical/local)

% 0.34 0.32 0.27 0.24 0.23 0.20 0.18 0.17 0.17 0.17 0.14 0.14 0.14 0.14 0.13 0.13 0.12 0.12 0.12 0.12

VisIt_T province ancient area san city sea famous century typical local natural well museum town nature park important made church art

% 0.34 0.27 0.26 0.25 0.25 0.24 0.23 0.21 0.21 0.19 0.19 0.16 0.16 0.16 0.16 0.16 0.16 0.15 0.15 0.14

VisBrit Britain park city home great world find London see castle England family top take visit national best history day museum

% 0.39 0.33 0.31 0.30 0.30 0.30 0.29 0.28 0.27 0.26 0.23 0.22 0.22 0.21 0.20 0.20 0.19 0.18 0.18 0.17

Translation and Tourist Promotion across Languages and Cultures

149

A look at the first twenty words of the three wordlists confirms what hypothesised on the basis of the three STTRs. Translated texts tend to retain the lexical features of their source texts rather than to adapt to the features and norms of the target language. For example, the adjectives ‘ancient’, ‘famous’, ‘typical’, ‘natural’, ‘important’, and the verb ‘made’ have a very high percentage of occurrence in the VisIt_T but not in the VisBrit. Conversely, frequent items in the VisBrit such as ‘home’, ‘world’, ‘top’, and ‘best’ are not among the most frequent 20 words of the VisIt_T and, as we will see later, they have low frequencies in the VisIt_T. Furthermore, in the list of the first twenty words of the VisIt_T, verbs are absent, apart from ‘made’, thus revealing a promotional approach which is very similar to the Italian one, that is to say where Action is not expressed through verbs, particularly in the Imperative form, as in the British website (see chapter two). In order to compare the three corpora in detail and to try to make some generalisation about the nature of the translated texts under analysis, a concordance analysis of those items which show an interesting mismatch in frequency will be carried out in the following section.

4.2.2 Comparing the VisIt_T, the VisBrit and the VisIt A comparison of the frequencies of the adjectives ‘ancient’, ‘famous’, ‘typical’, ‘natural’, and ‘important’ in the VisIt_T and in the VisBrit, and their literal Italian equivalents (with all their declensions) in the VisIt confirms the initial hypothesis of a type of translation predominantly source-text oriented, as shown in Table 4.3. TABLE 4.3. Adjectives in the VisIt, VisIt_T, VisBrit VisIt antic* famos* tipic* natural* important*

% 0.33 0.20 0.22 0.15 0.12

VisIt_T ancient famous typical natural important

% 0.27 0.23 0.21 0.19 0.16

VisBrit ancient famous typical natural important

% 0.06 0.16 0 0.07 0.02

‘Ancient’ In the VisBrit, that is to say in the corpus constituted of non-translated texts in British English, ‘ancient’ is used with ‘woodland’, ‘villages’, ‘ruins’, and other items referring to monuments.

150

Chapter Four

In the VisIt_T, ‘ancient’ has a more varied collocational profile: apart from ‘villages’, ‘ruins’, ‘churches’, and ‘castles’ which also occur in the VisBrit as collocates of ‘ancient’, there are several nouns, either abstract or concrete, such as: ‘tradition/s’, ‘city’, ‘times’, ‘town’, ‘origins’, ‘history’, ‘civilization’, ‘past’, ‘flavours’, etc. A very similar collocational profile can be found for the literal Italian equivalent of ‘ancient’ (antico and its declensions), thus showing that translators have tended towards literal strategies rather than adapting to the features of the target language and culture. As already discussed in chapter three, in the Italian language of tourism, tradition and past times tend to have a central role in the promotional process, as a consequence of the tendency of the Italian culture towards a more past-oriented idea of time (Brake et al., 1995; Katan, 2004; Manca, 2008) and a high score on the Uncertainty Avoidance dimension. The meaning conveyed by the adjective antico implies an added value to what is simply old, due to its reference to valued past styles and times (Manca 2008, p. 378). Conversely, in the British language of tourism, tradition and past are not similarly central due to the UK’s low scores on the Uncertainty Avoidance dimension. This suggests that British culture tends to focus on and give importance to the present and when reference to the past and traditions is made, descriptions are not abstract and evocative as the Italian ones but tend to be more concrete because they become part of the information and of the facts that have to be conveyed in order to persuade. This explains why in the translation of collocations such as tempi antichi (‘ancient times’), antiche tradizioni (‘ancient traditions’), and antichi sapori (‘ancient flavours’) both linguistic and cultural features should be taken into account. ‘Ancient times’ is an unusual collocation in the English language and could simply be replaced by the noun ‘past’ where the emphasis conveyed by ‘ancient’ is neutralised; ‘ancient traditions’ is similarly unusual and could be replaced by a more idiomatic ‘century-old traditions’ or by indicating concretely what is traditional, such as ‘traditional villages’, ‘traditional music’ or ‘traditional fish ‘n’ chips’. The collocation ‘ancient flavours’ refers to products grown and dishes made as they were grown and made in the past, that is to say without using chemicals or modern domestic appliances such as an electric oven. In the mind of a potential Italian customer, which perceives the past as a positive and safe entity, this collocation pushes the right button and may be one of the main reasons why he/she will be convinced to book the holiday advertised. However, in the VisBrit the noun ‘flavours’ occurs only twice

Translation and Tourist Promotion across Languages and Cultures

151

in the plural and five times in the singular and never collocates with adjectives referring to time. The same is true for ‘food’ and ‘produce’ which could be taken as more concrete synonyms of ‘flavours’. This may suggest that the association of ‘ancient’ and ‘flavours’ is not only linguistically but also culturally unusual in the English language. A more appropriate translation into English, where by ‘appropriate’ we mean from a linguistic and socio-cultural perspective, would require the use of the adjective ‘traditional’ followed by the specific name of a food or of the collocations ‘local produce’ or ‘local food’ which convey a similar meaning with less emphasis and a neutralised cultural connotation, as summarized below: Italian collocation (VisIt) tempi antichi antiche tradizioni

Unusual collocation (VisIt_T) ancient times ancient traditions

antichi sapori

ancient flavours

Usual collocation (VisBrit) - past - century-old traditions; - traditional + noun - traditional + noun - local produce - local food

The usage of the adjective ‘ancient’ in translated texts represents an example of interference of the source text and an example of untypical lexical patterning if compared to non-translated texts. ‘Famous’ The adjective ‘famous’ in the VisIt_T is so varied in its associations that its regularities can be found only in terms of semantic preferences: it frequently co-occurs with the semantic field of food, with items referring to the environment, or with items referring to heritage and culture. It is frequently used in the pattern ‘to be + famous + for’. In the VisBrit, ‘famous’ similarly co-occurs with items referring to food (although less frequently than its correspondent in the VisIt_T), and to heritage, but it is never used in association with items referring to the environment. Once again, ‘famous’ in the VisIt_T shows a collocational profile very similar to its Italian literal equivalent famoso and its declensions, in the VisIt, thus showing that the translation of the patterns in which this item is used has been subject to the universal of interference. Some examples are reported below:

152 Italian collocation (VisIt) rinomata località famosi monumenti

Chapter Four Unusual collocation (VisIt_T) famous resort famous monuments

Usual collocation (VisBrit) popular resort - famous attractions - popular attractions - top attractions - must-see attractions

The collocation ‘famous resort’ used in the VisIt_T to translate literally the Italian rinomata località is never used in the VisBrit and it is an example of untypical patterning. Conversely, the noun ‘resort’ in the VisBrit appears to be co-selected with the adjective ‘popular’. A more adequate translation equivalent of the Italian unit would therefore be ‘popular resort’. Similarly, the translation equivalent ‘famous monuments’ for the Italian famosi monumenti reflects an untypical patterning. In the VisBrit, the noun ‘monument’ occurs only 4 times in the singular form and 6 times in the plural form, which means less than 0.01% for both. These very low frequencies suggest that ‘monument/s’ is rarely used in this particular language of tourism and that other semantically similar items are preferred. A look at the collocational profile of the adjective ‘famous’ reveals the presence of another noun which could be considered the semantic and functional equivalence of the Italian monumenti, that is to say ‘attractions’. This item shows a very high frequency (0.17%) particularly in its plural form and is frequently co-selected with items generally referring to ‘popularity and fame’ such as ‘famous’, ‘popular’, ‘top’ and ‘must-see’. For this reason, more adequate translations of the Italian famosi monumenti are ‘famous attractions’, ‘popular attractions’, ‘top attractions’, ‘must-see attractions’. Once again, the two universals which characterise the translated item ‘famous’ are interference of the source text and untypical lexical patterning when compared with the VisBrit. ‘Typical’ The frequencies related to ‘typical’ in the VisIt_T and in the VisBrit clearly suggest a usage which reflects the linguistic behaviour of the literal Italian correspondent tipico and are another clear example of interference. In the VisBrit ‘typical’ is used only once while in the VisIt_T it has a high percentage of occurrence. In order to understand the reasons behind this difference, a concordance analysis of ‘typical’ in the VisIt_T and of its

Translation and Tourist Promotion across Languages and Cultures

153

literal Italian equivalent tipico and its declensions in the VisIt is needed. In the VisIt_T, this adjective mainly occurs with items referring to food, such as: ‘dish/es’, ‘products’, ‘produce’, ‘desserts’, ‘wines’, ‘cheese/s’, ‘food’, ‘specialties’, ‘delicacies’, etc. Some less frequent collocates are ‘architecture’ and ‘villages’. The literal Italian equivalent in the VisIt has a very similar collocational profile but also includes items such as cucina (cuisine), paesaggi (views), and sapori (flavours). In the VisBrit, items such as ‘dishes’ and ‘products’ are almost absent. The noun ‘produce’ occurs with a percentage of 0.02% and among its collocates there is ‘local’ which performs the same function and carries a very similar meaning to the Italian tipico. A look at the collocational profile of ‘local’ in the VisBrit reveals that this adjective is also a collocate of ‘food’ thus confirming that it can be considered the right translation equivalent in this context, as summarised below: Italian collocation (VisIt) prodotti tipici piatti tipici

Unusual collocation (VisIt_T) typical products typical dishes

Usual collocation (VisBrit) local produce local food

In the VisIt_T the adjective ‘local’ is present and is used as a synonym of ‘typical’ as it occurs with items referring to food, cuisine and gastronomy. Items which collocate only with ‘local’ are ‘traditions’, ‘festivals’, and ‘culture’. Summing up the entries of ‘local’ and ‘typical’ in the VisIt_T we obtain a total percentage of 0.41% which confirms what has already been noted in chapter two and chapter three, that is to say that the concept of what is typical of Italy is very much emphasised and considered an important promotional strategy to be used to attract nondomestic tourism. However, the overuse of ‘typical’ and ‘local’ in the translated texts indicates the presence of untypical patterning, both from a linguistic and cultural perspective. ‘Natural’ Another adjective which looks very interesting in terms of comparative frequencies is ‘natural’. The collocational profile of ‘natural’ in the VisIt_T is constituted by items such as ‘park/s’, ‘reserve/s’, ‘beauty’, ‘environment/s’, ‘wonders’, ‘treasures’, ‘surroundings’, ‘landscape/s’, ‘oasis’, ‘monuments’, ‘endowments’, ‘setting’, ‘sceneries’, ‘attractions’, etc.

154

Chapter Four

In the VisBrit the usage of ‘natural’ is less varied than in the VisIt_T and much more concrete: ‘beauty’ is among its collocates but in most cases it is part of the designation ‘an area of outstanding natural beauty’; the same is for ‘world’, occurring in the phrase ‘natural world heritage site’. Other nouns can be grouped in the semantic field of environment such as ‘harbour’, ‘rockpools’, ‘thermal spa’ etc. In the VisIt, the literal Italian equivalent naturale and its plural declension naturali co-occur with nouns such as parco/chi (park/s), riserva/e (reserve/s), ambiente (environment), bellezze (beauties), oasi (oasis), paesaggio (landscape/view), scenario (scenery), monumento (monument) and so on. A comparison of the three collocational profiles suggests a predominantly source-oriented translation which does not consider the inevitable variations in the association of words moving from one language to the other. The collocations ‘natural park/s’ and ‘natural reserve/s’, which are so frequent in the VisIt_T, are absent in the VisBrit. Indeed, the Italian parco naturale and riserva naturale should be translated ‘nature park’ and ‘nature reserve’ as a look at the VisBrit confirms (see Manca, 2004). Another example of interference caused by the source text is the use of the noun ‘environment’ in the collocation ‘natural environment’ in order to translate literally the Italian ambiente naturale. The word ‘environment’ in the VisBrit is used with a very low frequency and is almost always qualified by the adjectives ‘friendly’, ‘child-friendly’ or ‘relaxed’. A more adequate translation equivalent would be ‘area’ as suggested by the VisBrit. Italian collocation (VisIt) riserva naturale parco naturale ambiente naturale

Unusual collocation (VisIt_T) natural reserve natural park natural environment

Usual collocation (VisBrit) nature reserve nature park natural area

The interference of the source text inevitably leads to untypical lexical patterning, which is visible when patterns are compared and contrasted against non-translational corpora. ‘Important’ The adjective ‘important’ is much more frequent in the VisIt_T than in the VisBrit or even than its Italian literal equivalent importante and its declensions in the VisIt. Its collocational profile includes words such as

Translation and Tourist Promotion across Languages and Cultures

155

‘towns’, ‘works of art’, ‘testimonies’, ‘traces’, ‘festivals’, ‘monuments’, ‘centre’, ‘example/s’, ‘sites’ and so on. In the VisBrit, this adjective occurs with a very low frequency, only 17 times (0.02%), and does not show any recurring pattern. As expected, in the VisIt, the Italian equivalent importante and its declensions have a collocational profile which is very similar to ‘important’ in the VisIt_T. Some examples of unusual collocations in the VisIt_T and possible alternatives suggested by the VisBrit are reported below: Italian collocation (VisIt) importante destinazione/meta importante manifestazione

Unusual collocation (VisIt_T) important destination important event

Usual collocation (VisBrit) -perfect destination -favourite destination large/big festival

The collocation ‘important destination’ is used in the VisIt_T to translate the Italian importante destinazione/meta. However, this collocation is absent in the VisBrit. A look at the collocational profile of ‘destination’ in the VisBrit suggests that more idiomatic collocates of this word are ‘perfect’ and ‘favourite’. For this reason the following Italian sentence: La Sicilia è diventata una destinazione importante anche per gli amanti del golf

could be better translated: ‘Sicily has become a favourite destination for golf lovers’

instead of the less idiomatic ‘Sicily has become an important destination for lovers of golf’ used in the VisIt_T. Another frequent collocation of ‘important’ in the VisIt_T is ‘important event’ mainly used to translate the literally corresponding importante manifestazione used in the Italian corpus. However, a search in the VisBrit for this collocation does not provide any results. The word ‘event’ has very few entries and never occurs with ‘important’. An alternative to ‘event’ in English could be the word ‘festival’ which refers to a type of event or a series of performances. This item is indeed very frequently used in the VisBrit (0.10%) and among its adjectives ‘large’ and ‘big’ seems to perform a very similar function to that of the Italian

156

Chapter Four

importante. For this reason, the Italian importante manifestazione could be more appropriately translated with ‘large/big festival’. ‘Made’ The verb ‘make’ in the past participle ‘made’ has a high percentage of occurrence in the VisIt_T, 0.15%, particularly if compared to its low percentage in the VisBrit, 0.04%. In the VisIt_T, it is mainly co-selected with the semantic field of food, it colligates with the prepositions ‘with’, ‘of’, ‘in’, ‘from’, and with ‘up of’ when used as a phrasal verb. It also colligates with the prepositional phrase ‘according to’. In almost all its instances ‘made’ is used to describe the ingredients which are used to prepare a local dish, as in for example ‘top place goes to mostarda d’uva (jam made with grapes from the Molise countryside)’ or in ‘the Pavese soup is also well-known and is made with broth, eggs and cheese …’. When used as a phrasal verb with ‘up’, it is used to describe the features of the area, for example ‘The Province is made up of four distinct zones’ or ‘The coastline is made up of extensive beaches’. Interestingly, when ‘made’ is used in association with ‘according to’ it always refers to traditional methods and recipes, as in ‘…sheep pecorino cheese, provola and cottage cheese, all made according to ancient traditions’ and ‘…and other regional desserts made according to centuryold recipes’, thus confirming the importance of past times for the Italian culture due to its high scores on the Uncertainty Avoidance dimension. There are also some instances of ‘made’ used in association with ‘famous’, as in ‘…Juliet’s romantic balcony, made famous by Shakespeare’s tragedy’. In the VisBrit, ‘made’ occurs with a low percentage, 0.04%. When used as part of the phrasal verb ‘made up of’ it has a very similar usage to that in the VisIt_T. When it is not used as a phrasal verb, it collocates only once with the preposition ‘with’, only four times with ‘from’ and it never collocates with ‘in’ or ‘of’. This difference in terms of frequency and usage may be mainly due to the non-frequent presence of the semantic field of Food in the VisBrit, as already described in chapter two. Indeed, words such as ‘dishes’, ‘recipes’, ‘ingredients’ have a very low frequency of occurrence in the VisBrit, lower than 0.01%, and, for this reason, an adequate comparison of how the item is used and should be used cannot be carried out. What is interesting is that the literal Italian equivalent fatto has a low percentage of occurrence in the VisIt and is used only in a few instances to

Translation and Tourist Promotion across Languages and Cultures

157

list the ingredients of a local recipe. Verbs and expressions mainly used in the VisIt to describe local food and list ingredients are prodotta da/con (produced from/with), a base di (based on), ottenuto da (obtained from). This shows that the apparent overuse of ‘made’ in the VisIt_T is not due to the interference of the source text but may depend on the different emphasis given to the semantic field of Food in the two corpora or on the level of the linguistic competence of the translator. Although a thorough and more detailed analysis would be needed, the examination of the first most frequent 20 words in the three corpora suggests that translators have chosen to subject themselves to the norms established in the ST thus producing target texts which are adequate but not acceptable (Toury 1995, p. 57). The universal of translation which seems to be predominant in the translated version of the Italian website, is the law of interference (ibid., p. 274-279). According to Toury, interference refers to ST linguistic features (mainly lexical and syntactical patterning) being copied in the TT. In this specific case they are copied ‘negatively’, because they create non-normal TT patterns (Munday 2001, p. 114). The comparison of these units against the VisBrit has shown that another predominant universal is ‘untypical lexical patterning’ (Mauranen 2000) which is obviously caused by a process of translation which does not consider an inevitable shift in terms of lexical and syntactic features moving from one language to another. In the following sections, translated and non-translated texts will be further analysed but the starting point will be represented by the words which are frequently used in the VisBrit and not similarly frequent or absent in the VisIt_T.

4.2.3 From non-translated texts (VisBrit) to translated texts (VisIt_T) The comparison of the two wordlists of the VisBrit and the VisIt_T (see Table 4.2) has also revealed the presence of words which are highly frequent in the VisBrit but not frequently used or are even absent in the corpus of translated texts. These words are ‘home’, ‘world’, ‘top’ and ‘best’. A hypothesis on this mismatch in terms of frequencies can be referred to Tirkonen-Condit’s theories on unique lexical items (2004, p. 177). She suggests that translated texts would manifest lower frequencies of linguistic elements that lack linguistic counterparts in the source languages such that these could also be used as translation equivalents. These items are defined ‘unique items’ being themselves unique in the

Chapter Four

158

translation potential as they are not similarly manifested in the source language of the translation. In order to check if this is the case with the above-mentioned words, an analysis of their collocational profile in the VisBrit and in the VisIt_T will be carried out. ‘Home’ As already noted in chapter two, the item ‘home’ is frequently embedded in phrases such as ‘(names of places/towns) + is + home + to/of’ as in ‘Leicester is also home to a fantastic array of music venues” and “Scotland is the spiritual home of whisky’. When ‘home’ is followed by ‘to’, it has a meaning which, in most cases, requires the translation units in which it is embedded to be paraphrased in Italian because a straightforward equivalent is absent. The literal equivalent ‘casa’ is used differently in Italian and sede (seat) would be adequate only when talking about seats of institutions. The high frequency of this item would imply a similarly high frequency in the VisIt_T if translators have opted to make these translations ‘acceptable’ (Toury 1995, p. 57), that is to say if they have opted for a product where the target language norms prevail. The frequency of ‘home’ in the VisIt_T is 0.06% which is a very low frequency of occurrence if compared to its occurrence in the VisBrit, 0.30%. Nevertheless, when it occurs in the pattern ‘to be + home to’ this item is used very similarly in both the VisIt_T and in the VisBrit. In Italian, the functional correspondent of this phrase could be represented by the verbs ospitare (host) and accogliere (house), whose collocational profiles in the VisIt are similar to ‘home to’ in the VisBrit. This may also explain why in the VisIt_T the verb ‘host’ is twice as frequent as in the VisBrit (0.06% vs. 0.03%). The word ‘home’ can be, thus, considered a unique item and translators should be encouraged to use the phrases it is embedded in more frequently. For example, in the following Italian sentence the verb ospitare has been translated with the verb ‘host’: La provincia di Venezia ospita, durante tutti i mesi dell’anno, numerosi eventi, feste, sagre e manifestazioni. ‘The Province of Venice hosts, throughout the year, various events, festivals, feasts and cultural performances.’

If ‘home to’ is preferred to ‘host’, an alternative and more appropriate translation would be the following:

Translation and Tourist Promotion across Languages and Cultures

159

‘The Province of Venice is home to several food festivals and cultural venues throughout the year’.

‘World’ The item ‘world’ is another very frequent word in the VisBrit (0.30%), particularly if compared to its entries in the VisIt_T (0.13%). Both in the VisBrit and in the VisIt_T, the item occurs in the phrase ‘World Heritage Site’ and it colligates with superlatives when it occurs in the phrase ‘in the world’. In the VisBrit, superlatives also co-occur with this item when it is embedded in phrases such as ‘some/one of the world’s greatest sporting events’ which, however, never occur in the VisIt_T. Two frequent phrases in the VisBrit, that is to say ‘world-class’ and ‘world-famous’ are similarly absent in the VisIt_T. These results suggest that ‘world’ can be considered a unique item in some of its usages. The fact that it is less frequently used in the corpus of translated texts may also depend on the fact that the reference to the world is less used as a general concept in the source texts. This is confirmed by the frequency of the Italian literal equivalent mondo which has a percentage of only 0.09% in the VisIt. This means that translators have opted for a more idiomatic use of the English language by increasing the reference to the ‘world’ of 0.04%. However, it is still less than the half of the occurrences of ‘world’ in the English non-translated texts. The example which follows focuses on the translation of superlatives when the reference to the world is present. The Italian sentence (taken from the VisIt): Courmayer è considerata una delle più importanti stazioni sciistiche del mondo

has been correctly translated: ‘Courmayer is one of the most famous ski resorts in the world’

but could also be translated making a grammatical and syntactic change which is very idiomatic of the target language: ‘Courmayer is one of the world’s most famous ski resorts’

Chapter Four

160

‘Top’ The item ‘top’ occurs with a percentage of 0.22% in the VisBrit and of 0.02% in the VisIt_T. Frequencies suggest that ‘top’ is very likely to be considered a unique lexical item. A look at its collocational profile will help confirm or dismiss this hypothesis. In the VisBrit, ‘top’ occurs in the phrases ‘top attractions’, ‘top daytime/nightime must-do’s’, ‘top nr. things to see’ and in place adverbials such as ‘at/to the top of’. In the VisIt_T, this item is only used in place adverbials, and phrases such as those identified in the VisBrit are absent. In Italian, a straightforward literal equivalent of ‘top’ when used with ‘attractions’, ‘must-do’s’ or ‘things to see’ is absent. In those cases, it could be replaced by adjectives such as belle (beautiful), importanti (important), or popolari (popular). This confirms that when ‘top’ is not used in phrases with the function of place adverbials, it is a unique lexical item. Translators should, therefore, try to use it more often if their aim is to adapt to the target language norms. For this reason, in the following Italian sentence, the phrase i monumenti più interessanti could be translated using the adjective ‘top’, as exemplified below: I monumenti più interessanti della città sono l’Abbazia di S. Spirito e la bellissima chiesa di S. Agata. ‘The city’s top attractions are the Abbey of The Holy Spirit and the beautiful St. Agatha church.’

‘Best’ The last word frequently occurring in the VisBrit (0.19%) but much less frequent in the VisIt_T (0.07%) is ‘best’. In both corpora, the item occurs in collocations such as ‘best-known’, ‘the best way of’ with similar frequency. Differences in the two collocational profiles can be seen in the phrase ‘the best of + (names of places)’ which is very frequent in the VisBrit but much less frequent in the VisIt_T, as in, for example, ‘Sample the best of Scotland’s whiskies’ and ‘See the best of England’s countryside’. Conversely, the two phrases ‘the best example/s of’ and ‘best-preserved + (names of places)’ are frequent in the VisIt_T but almost absent in the VisBrit. Both the items ‘example/s’ and ‘preserved’ are rarely used in the VisBrit. The Italian literal equivalent of ‘best’, that is to say migliore/i does not occur very frequently in the VisIt (0.02%) and this may explain why the

Translation and Tourist Promotion across Languages and Cultures

161

English translations of the Italian texts similarly feature a low occurrence of the adjective ‘best’. It may be assumed that once again the strategies adopted by translators reveal the interference of the source text and a tendency to avoid the selection of those English expressions which do not have a direct counterpart in Italian. In the following Italian sentence, for example, the adjective suggestivo (lit. ‘suggestive) could be translated using ‘best’, which is a frequent collocate of ‘view/s’ in English: Il luogo vanta un paesaggio tra i più suggestivi d’Italia ‘The area is renowned for having some of the best views in Italy’

The analysis of the four English words which have a high frequency in the VisBrit and a low frequency in the VisIt_T has shown the presence of another universal of translation, which refers to the unique lexical item theory (Tirkonnen-Condit, 2004). As hypothesised on the basis of the mismatch in frequency, translators’ choices which are apparently oriented towards the source text seem to tend towards the avoidance of those items and patterns which lack linguistic counterparts in Italian. For this reason and in order to produce more acceptable translations, translators should have a more specialised knowledge of the language of tourism and of its lexical and syntactic features.

4.2.4 Comparing the VisBrit_T, the VisBrit and the VisIt In this section the analysis will consider the English and the Italian non-translational corpora VisBrit and VisIt and a third corpus, the VisBrit_T, comprised of the Italian version of the English texts available on the website www.visitbritain.co.uk. The analysis starts, as in the previous cases reported above, with the comparison of the three STTRs in order to have a general idea of the lexical features of the three corpora (Table 4.4). This will be followed by a comparison of the lists of the first twenty words for each corpus and by an analysis of the concordances of those items which show a mismatch in frequency. The STTR of the VisBrit_T corpus is 47.71. This figure seems to be closer to the STTR of the VisBrit (45.28) rather than to that of the VisIt (52.38) and also suggests that the VisBrit_T has a narrower range of lexical items with respect to the Italian corpus. It can therefore be hypothesised that translations may tend to be literal and source-text oriented. However, further analyses are needed in order to state that.

Chapter Four

162

TABLE 4.4. STTRs of the VisBrit_T, VisBrit, and VisIt

STTR

VisBrit_T 47.71

VisBrit 45.28

VisIt 52.38

A look at the first 20 items in the VisBrit_T, compared with the first 20 lexical items of the VisIt and the VisBrit reveals many differences in terms of frequencies, as shown in Table 4.5 (words with mismatch in frequency are highlighted in bold). TABLE 4.5. First 20 content words in the VisIt, VisBrit_T, and VisBrit VisIt provincia (province) città (city) territorio (territory) san (saint) mare (sea)

% 0.34

VisBrit_T Gran (Great)

% 0.43

VisBrit Britain

% 0.39

0.32 0.27

Bretagna (Britain) città (city)

0.42 0.33

park city

0.33 0.31

0.24 0.23

0.26 0.24

home great

0.30 0.30

terra (land) centro (centre)

0.20 0.18

0.19 0.18

world find

0.30 0.29

parco (park) grande (big/great) natura (nature)

0.17 0.17

0.17 0.16

London see

0.28 0.27

0.17

0.15

castle

0.26

museo (museum) storia (history) arte (art) zona (zone/area)

0.14 0.14 0.14 0.14

0.15 0.15 0.15 0.14

England family top take

0.23 0.22 0.22 0.21

parte (part) palazzo (palace) castello (castle)

0.13 0.13 0.12

0.14 0.13 0.13

visit national best

0.20 0.20 0.19

chiesa (church) storico (historic) tipici (typical/local)

0.12 0.12 0.12

Londra (London) informazioni (information) mondo (world) Inghilterra (England) storia (history) visitate (visit – 2nd pers.pl Imp.) troverete (find-2nd pers.pl.Fut.) ulteriori (further) visita (visit – n.) Scozia (Scotland) attrazioni (attractions) centro (centre) migliori (best) offre (offers – 3rd pers.sing Pres.) ammirare (admire) anni (years) Galles (Wales)

0.13 0.12 0.12

history day museum

0.18 0.18 0.17

Translation and Tourist Promotion across Languages and Cultures

163

The items informazioni (information), mondo (world), visitate (visit – 2nd pers. pl. Imperative), troverete (find – 2nd pers.pl. Future), visita (visit 2nd pers. sing. Imperative), attrazioni (attractions), migliori (best) occur much more frequently in the VisBrit_T than in the VisIt and have a frequency which is more similar to their English literal counterparts in the VisBrit. In order to analyse in deeper detail the differences identified in the comparison of the three wordlists, each item will be analysed in its collocational profile (see Table 4.6). TABLE 4.6. Words with mismatch in frequency in the VisIt, VisBrit_T and VisBrit VisIt informazioni

% 0

mondo visitate

0.09 0

troverete

0

visita

0

attrazioni

0.01

miglior*

0.02

VisBrit_T informazioni (information) mondo (world) visitate (visit – 2nd pers.pl Imp.) troverete (find-2nd pers.pl.Fut.) visita (visit – 2nd pers. sing Imp) attrazioni (attractions) migliori (best)

% 0.24

VisBrit information

% 0.02

0.19 0.16

world visit (v. - Imp)

0.30 0.16

0.15

you’ll find

0.03

0.15

visit (v. - Imp)

0.16

0.14

attractions

0.17

0.13

best

0.19

Informazioni (information) The item informazioni, occurring in the VisBrit_T with a percentage of 0.24%, almost never occurs in the VisIt. The same can be said for ulteriori which is one of the most common collocates of informazioni in the Italian language. A look at the English source texts, contained in the VisBrit, suggests that the collocation ulteriori informazioni, so frequently found in the VisBrit_T, has been chosen by translators as the translation equivalent of ‘learn more’, whose literal translation (impara di più) would have no meaning in this specific context in Italian. However, the absence of a similarly frequent expression in the Italian website referring to how to have access to further information is mainly due to the way in which the Italian website is organized. Further information can be found by clicking on links utili (useful links), usually located in the right-side section of the Italian webpage.

164

Chapter Four

Mondo and migliore (world and best) The items mondo (world) and migliore (best) have already been analysed in the comparison of the VisBrit and the VisIt_T corpora. The differences in the percentage of usage of these items in the VisBrit_T and in the VisIt confirm that these items are typical of the English language of tourism and are less used in the corresponding variety of the Italian language. Indeed, mondo (world) in the corpus of translated texts (VisBrit_T) has a percentage of 0.19% while in the VisIt it occurs with a percentage of 0.9%. The adjective migliori (best) in the masculine plural form occurs with a percentage of 0.13% in the VisBrit_T and 0.01% in the VisIt. This suggests that the universal of interference also characterises the translations from English into Italian thus leading to an untypical usage of these items. Attrazioni (attractions) The item with an unexpected mismatch in frequency is attrazioni (attractions) occurring in the VisBrit_T with a percentage of 0.14% and occurring in only 4 entries (less than 0.01%) in the corpus of nontranslated Italian texts, VisIt. A look at its collocational profile allows us to identify the reasons behind this difference in frequency. The most frequent collocates of attrazioni in the VisBrit_T are turistiche (tourist), storiche (historic), principali (main), famose (famous), straordinarie (extraordinary), fantastiche (fantastic), and the types of attractions advertised are varied: from castles to parks, galleries, museums, zoos, monuments, scenic roads and so on. Searching the collocational profiles of the same adjectives in the VisIt, items such as the following can be found: località (places), mete (destinations), memorie (memories), testimonianze (traces/proofs), monumenti (monuments), centri (centres), piazze (squares), città (cities), luoghi (places), attrattive (attractions/appeals). Their collocational profiles are varied but the word attrazioni never collocates with the above mentioned adjectives. This may suggest that the reasons for the high frequency of attrazioni in the VisBrit_T is to be found in its usage in collocations which are unusual for the Italian language of tourism and which origin from sourcetext oriented translators’ choices. In order to identify an appropriate Italian translation equivalent of ‘attractions’ further analyses are needed. Let us start from the Italian attrattive which occurs in the VisIt with some of the adjectives identified for attrazioni in the VisBrit_T (attrattive storico-artistiche, attrattive principali, …). However, this item in the VisIt

Translation and Tourist Promotion across Languages and Cultures

165

has a low percentage of occurrence, 0.02%, which suggests that there may be other and more specific Italian words which are used to refer to the several attractions available to tourists in Italy. A clue is given by the verb offrire (offer) which is frequent in the collocational profile of attrattive in the VisIt, and is generally used in the Italian corpus to describe and list what can be found and enjoyed in the places advertised. This verb has a very interesting collocational profile because, particularly when it is used in the 3rd person singular offre (offers), it frequently collocates with many items that could be selected as functional equivalents of the English ‘attractions’, such as possibilità (possibility/ies), opportunità (opportunity/ies), monumenti (monuments), percorsi (path/itineraries), luoghi (places). While the last three words (monumenti, percorsi, luoghi) specifically refer to something concrete, the first two, namely possibilità and opportunità, are more general as shown by their collocational profiles. The item possibilità is, in most cases, preceded by offre and by names of places and followed by the preposition di and the semantic field of activities such as in Una passeggiata tra le vie del centro storico offre la possibilità di ammirare splendidi capolavori settecenteschi … (lit. transl.: A walk through the streets of the historic centre offers the possibility to admire wonderful 18th century works of art …) and in Il parco offre anche la possibilità di visitare la sala ornitologica … (lit.transl.: The park offers the possibility to visit the ornithological room). The item opportunità has a very similar usage and occurs in sentences such as Chi ha deciso di trascorrere le proprie vacanze in Campania avrà l’imbarazzo della scelta fra le tante opportunità che offre (lit. transl.: those who have decided to spend their holidays in Campania will be spoilt for choice among the many opportunities it offers) and in I Parchi Nazionali offrono un ventaglio di opportunità così ampio da soddisfare ogni tipo di esigenza (lit. transl.: The National Parks offer such a wide range of opportunities that every need will be met). On the basis of these results, the following sentences from the VisBrit and from the VisBrit_T will be proposed as an example of how collocations should be adapted to the target language features thus eliminating source-text interference and untypical lexical patterning. Sentences are taken from the original texts in the VisBrit: two Italian versions are proposed, the official Italian translation available on the website and an alternative translation based on corpus results: 1. Britain is home to thousands of must-see historical attractions. (VisBrit) 1a. In Gran Bretagna ci sono migliaia di attrazioni storiche che valgono una visita. (VisBrit_T)

166

Chapter Four 1b. In Gran Bretagna ci sono migliaia di attrattive storiche che meritano di essere visitate. 2. As well as London’s world-famous attractions, you'll find historical sites like Stonehenge, ecological attractions such as the Eden Project and great family attractions ranging from zoos and safari parks to picnic spots and beaches. (VisBrit) 2a. Oltre alle famose attrazioni di Londra, sono presenti posti storici come Stonehenge, attrazioni naturali come l’Eden Project. Inoltre sono presenti attrazioni per famiglie come zoos, safari parks, spazi per picnic e spiagge. (VisBrit_T) 2b. Oltre ai monumenti e ai luoghi più famosi della città di Londra, il territorio offre siti storici come Stonehenge, attrattive naturalistiche quali l’Eden Project e meravigliose possibilità di svago per tutta la famiglia, dagli zoo ai parchi safari, dalle aree picnic alle spiagge. 3. In every corner of Britain you’ll find hundreds of great attractions, ranging from small local museums to world-famous attractions like Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament. (VisBrit) 3a. In ogni angolo della Gran Bretagna troverete numerose attrazioni, dai piccoli musei locali alle attrazioni famose in tutto il mondo come il Big Ben e il Palazzo di Westminster. (VisBrit_T) 3b. Ogni angolo della Gran Bretagna offre infinite opportunità, dai piccoli musei ai monumenti come il Big Ben e il Palazzo di Westminster, famosi in tutto il mondo.

The absence in the Italian language of a general term which could refer to historic, artistic, cultural, and ecological attractions obliges translators to use more specific items such as monumenti, luoghi, percorsi, … (monuments, places, itineraries, …) or to use words generally referring to what is possible to do and see, such as attrattive, possibilità, and opportunità. For this reason, other alternative equivalents for ‘attractions’ could be chosen in the above reported sentences. These examples, however, provide a more idiomatic usage of the Italian language where the risks in terms of accessibility connected with unusual patterning are eliminated. Visita, visitate and troverete (‘visit’ and ‘you’ll find’) Other interesting insights, in the comparison of the VisBrit_T, the VisIt and the VisBrit, are provided by the verbs visitate (visit) in the 2nd person plural of the Imperative, visita (visit) in the 2nd person singular of the Imperative, and troverete (you’ll find) in the 2nd person plural of the Simple Future.

Translation and Tourist Promotion across Languages and Cultures

167

The two conjugations of the verb visitare (visit) in the 2nd person singular and plural of the Imperative are an example of interference and, consequently, of lack of adaptation to the norms of the target language and culture. As already described in chapter two and chapter three, in the Italian website, readers and potential tourists are never directly addressed through the Imperative form and more impersonal forms are preferred. The use of the two Imperatives sounds odd in this context and reflects a lack of accuracy: once again the texts are adequate but not acceptable for the target language and culture. The same can be said for the Future form troverete (you will find), whose English equivalent is frequently used to express certainty but which is used only three times in the Italian website. The reason for this mismatch is not only due to differences in the way readers are addressed but also to differences in the type of promotion which does not attract potential customers by promising and inviting but rather by describing places and what can be done and enjoyed. Some examples of non-acceptable translations and of more idiomatic alternatives are provided below: 1. Get into the swing of island life at an easy pace, see castles, stroll past wisteria-clad cottages, then tuck into freshly caught lobster, crab, scallops and oysters. (VisBrit) 2a. Scoprite il rilassato stile di vita delle isole, visitate i castelli, passeggiate nelle vie costeggiate da incantevoli cottage ricoperti di glicini e gustate aragoste, granchi, capesante e ostriche appena pescati.(VisBrit_T) 2b. Su queste isole, dove la vita procede lenta e tranquilla, è possibile ammirare castelli, passeggiare per le vie costeggiate da incantevoli cottage ricoperti dai glicini e gustare aragoste, granchi, capesante e ostriche appena pescate. (On these islands where life is slow and quiet, it is possible to admire castles, to walk along the streets flanked by cottages covered with wisteria and to taste freshly caught lobster, crab, scallops and oysters.)

In the alternative 2b, the Imperative is replaced by a more impersonal è possibile (it is possible) frequently used in Italian to describe what tourists can enjoy when visiting the places advertised. Summarising the results of the analysis, it is clear that interference and unusual lexical patterning are the two frequent universals which also characterise the translations from English into Italian. The influence of the source text in terms of lexical choice and syntactic patterning is still too visible in target texts which are, therefore, characterised by the unacceptable presence of frequent unusual lexical patterns. This obviously

Chapter Four

168

implies a non- or partial accessibility of readers to the translated texts thus reducing the effects of the persuasive function on the target audience.

4.2.5 Comparing the VisAus_T, the VisAus and the VisIt The analysis continues with the comparison of the Italian corpus of translated texts available on the website www.australia.com (VisAus_T), the English corpus of original texts available on the same website (VisAus) and the Italian corpus of original texts available on the website www.italia.it (VisIt). As with previous analyses, the identification of the linguistic features which are typical of translated texts will start from the three STTRs and will continue with the comparison of the lists of the first twenty words for each corpus (see Table 4.7 and Table 4.8). The STTR of the VisAus_T corpus is 50.65. This figure seems to be closer to the STTR of the VisIt (52.38) rather than to that of the VisAus (45.83). This may suggest that, in the process of translation into Italian, translators have adopted more target-language oriented choices. TABLE 4.7. STTRs of the VisAus_T, VisIt and VisAus

STTR

VisAus_T 50.65

VisIt 52.38

VisAus 45.83

A look at the first 20 items in the VisAus_T, compared with the first 20 lexical items of the VisIt and the VisAus (Table 4.8) will help us confirm or confute what is suggested by the three STTRs (words with mismatch in frequency are highlighted in bold). TABLE 4.8. First 20 content words in the VisIt, VisAus_T, and VisAus VisIt provincia (province) città (city) territorio (territory) san (saint) mare (sea) terra (land) centro (centre)

% 0.34 0.32 0.27 0.24 0.23 0.20 0.18

parco (park)

0.17

VisAus_T giorno (day) lungo (long) Sidney città (city) Australia spiagge (beaches) fate (do – 2nd pers. pl.Imp) fiume (river)

% 0.83 0.39 0.24 0.23 0.20 0.19 0.19

VisAus Australia park national see beach world south

% 0.48 0.43 0.40 0.34 0.32 0.30 0.29

0.16

island

0.28

Translation and Tourist Promotion across Languages and Cultures grande (big/great)

0.17

natura (nature) museo (museum) storia (history) arte (art) zona (zone/area) parte (part) palazzo (palace)

0.17 0.14 0.14 0.14 0.14 0.13 0.13

castello (castle)

0.12

chiesa (church) storico (historic) tipici (typical/local)

0.12 0.12 0.12

ammirate (admire – 2nd pers.pl. Imp) nord (north) fare (do) sud (south) mondo (world) parco (park) foresta (forest) visitate (visit- 2nd pers. pl Imp.) ammirare (admire) inizio (start) locali (local/s) storia (history)

169

0.16

Australian

0.26

0.16 0.15 0.15 0.15 0.14 0.14 0.14

aboriginal bay river walk drive day take

0.26 0.26 0.26 0.23 0.22 0.21 0.21

0.14

art

0.20

0.13 0.13 0.13

beaches great visit

0.20 0.20 0.20

As visible in Table 4.8, although the comparison of the three STTRs seems to suggest that the Italian version of the Australian website is characterised by target-language oriented strategies, the frequent presence of some items conversely reveals a lack of adaptation to TL norms (see Table 4.9). TABLE 4.9. Words with mismatch in frequency in the VisIt, VisAus_T and VisAus VisIt fate (do – 2nd pers. pl.Imp) ammirate (admire – 2nd pers.pl. Imp)

% 0

VisAus_T fate (do – 2nd pers. pl.Imp) ammirate (admire – 2nd pers.pl. Imp)

% 0.19

fare (do)

0.02

fare (do)

0.15

mondo (world) visitate (visit- 2nd pers. pl Imp.) ammirare (admire) locali (local/s)

0.09 0

mondo (world) visitate (visit- 2nd pers. pl Imp.) ammirare (admire) locali (local/s)

0

0.06 0.13

0.15 0.14

VisAus do/take/ have/… admire (2nd pers.pl. Imp) do/take/ have/… world visit

0.30 0.20

0.14

admire

0.005

0.13

locals

0.17

0.16

% … 0.005

…

The Imperatives (fate – do; ammirate – admire; visitate – visit) have no occurrences in the VisIt and the reason for their presence in the VisAus_T is, therefore, to be identified in the interference of the source text. It is not possible to identify a single equivalent both for fate and for fare (they

Chapter Four

170

could be ‘do’, ‘take’, ‘have’ or even other verbs), and for this reason a percentage of occurrence of the equivalents of these items in the VisAus cannot be indicated. The verbs ammirate and ammirare have as a literal equivalent ‘admire’ which has a very low frequency of occurrence in the VisAus but, as discussed in the analysis of Modality (section 3.5), these verbs are culturally equivalent to ‘see’ which is much more preferred in the VisAus (0.33%). The noun mondo, although less frequently used in the VisAus_T than in the VisAus, has still a higher frequency than its counterpart in the VisIt, mondo. As for locali, although it shows the same frequency both in the VisIt and in the VisAus_T, it has a different usage in the corpus of translated texts, as described in the following sections. Imperatives and Infinitives As already discussed in the previous chapters, persuasion in the Italian language of tourism is never achieved through Imperative forms which directly address the reader, due to the Italian culture’s high scores on the Power Distance dimension. Impersonal forms are preferred and the fourth step of the model, Action, is never achieved through direct invitation to act. If this style of communication is so common in the Italian culture it consequently means that it is effective in terms of persuasion. For this reason, as Imperatives are not a common feature of the language of Italian tourist promotion, it would be more effective to replace them with impersonal forms or with descriptions of ‘possibilities’ and ‘opportunities’. The two Infinitives, fare (to do) and ammirare (to admire) are preceded, in many cases, by Imperatives, such as in Fermati ad ammirare i Bishop and Clark islets … (Stop to admire the Bishop and Clark Islets …) or in Imparate a fare immersioni e snorkeling tra i pesci … (lit. transl.: Learn how to do dive and snorkel among fish ….) thus revealing once again the presence of interference of the source text in the translated version of the website. Some examples of alternative, more adequate translations are reported below: 1. See the stone embankment dating back to the early 20th century and visit the site where the ambitious South Australian prospector George Woodroffe Goyder set up camp. (VisAus)

Translation and Tourist Promotion across Languages and Cultures

171

1a. Ammirate le strutture in pietra risalenti ai primi del XX secolo e visitate il luogo dove si accampò l'ambizioso cercatore d'oro George Woodroffe Goyder. (VisAus_T) 1b. Oltre ad ammirare le strutture in pietra risalenti all’inizio del XX secolo, si può visitare il luogo dove si accampò l’ambizioso cercatore d’oro George Woodroffe Goyder. (lit. transl.: Besides admiring the stone embankment dating back to the early 20th century, [people] can visit the place where the ambitious South Australian prospector George Woodroffe Goyder set up camp.) 2. Back in town, canoe or fish on Pemberton’s river, lake and estuary. (VisAus) 2a. Ritornati in città, fate una gita in canoa o pescate nel fiume, nel lago e nell’estuario di Pemberton. (VisAus_T) 2b. Ritornati in città è possibile praticare diverse attività tra cui la canoa o la pesca nel fiume, nel lago e nell’estuario di Pemberton. (lit. transl.: Back in town, it is possible to practice several activities among which canoe and fishing in Pemberton’s river, lake and estuary. 3. Snorkel or shallow dive with brightly adorned fish in the Bundegi Bombies reef sanctuary. (VisAus) 3a. Fate snorkeling o immersioni a basse profondità per ammirare pesci dai colori sgargianti nella barriera di Bundegi Bombies. (VisAus_T) 3b. Le escursioni subacquee e le immersioni a basse profondità permettono di ammirare i pesci dai colori sgargianti presenti nella barriera di Bundegi Bombies. (lit. transl.: Snorkeling and shallow diving allow [people] to admire brightly adorned fish which are present in the Bundegi Bombies reef.)

In the VisIt, expressions such as è possibile (it is possible), impersonal forms of the verb potere (can) such as si può and si possono and verbs such as permettere and consentire (‘allow’ - with the meaning of ‘making possible’) are much preferred to Imperatives and to forms of the Future. Forms such as potrete, potranno or troverete (you’ll be able – you’ll find) have a very low frequency of occurrence, as described in chapter three. Locali (locals) An interesting item in the VisAus_T is locali (local/s), used both as a noun and as an adjective. When used as an adjective, it collocates with abitanti (inhabitants), artisti (artists), prodotti (products/produce), vini (wines), mercati (markets). In the VisIt, abitanti (inhabitants) as well as gente (people) never collocate with locali (local) but rather with del luogo (of the place), di questa terra (of this land), or with possessive adjectives.

172

Chapter Four

As for prodotti (products/produce) and vini (wines), although both in the VisIt and in the VisAus_T they collocate with locali, in the non-translated Italian texts, the adjective tipici is more frequently preferred (see section 4.2.2). Some examples are reported below: English words and collocations (VisAus) locals

Unusual collocation (VisAus_T)

Usual collocation (VisIt)

abitanti locali

abitanti del luogo

- local produce - local wines

- prodotti locali - vini locali

- prodotti tipici - vini tipici

Mondo (world) Once again the word mondo (world) has a percentage of occurrence which is much higher than its Italian counterpart in non-translated texts (0.15% vs. 0.09%). The reasons for this mismatch have already been discussed for the VisBrit and the VisIt_T and are connected with a different usage of the concept of ‘world’, particularly in expressions containing superlatives and, consequently, with the universals of interference and of unique lexical items. The comparison of the VisAus_T, the VisAus and the VisIt has revealed the presence of the universals of interference and unusual lexical patterning already identified in the VisIt_T and in the VisBrit_T. Furthermore, the translators of the Australian website have not considered the different tendencies of the Italian culture in the activation of persuasion. Italian readers are never directly addressed, particularly through Imperative forms, and choices such as those adopted in the VisAus_T sound unusual and not acceptable. The process of persuasion is thus altered with obvious implications in the promotion of the destination, which is focused on Desire and Action in the translated version but should be rather focused on Attention and Interest to be successful for the Italian audience.

4.3 Conclusion The analyses carried out in this section undoubtedly show some limits as they start from the comparison of the first twenty words of each corpus. However, the comparison of translations against originals and against comparable non-translational corpora has provided interesting results

Translation and Tourist Promotion across Languages and Cultures

173

which can be taken as guidelines by translators of tourist texts from and into English and Italian. The analyses have focused on two main and connected aspects of the translated versions: a more theoretical one referring to the translators’ choices and the resulting universals of translation and a more pragmatic aspect which considers the way persuasion is activated or not activated through the adaptation or lack of adaptation and re-shaping of the tourist product. The universals which characterise the translated versions both into Italian and into English are interference and untypical lexical patterning. Translated texts retain many lexical and syntactic features of their source texts with obvious implications on lexical and syntactic patterning which is mostly untypical. Furthermore, the influence of the source text and the level of specialisation of translators have contributed to the frequent presence of ‘unique lexical items’ in the corpora of translated texts. The notion of ‘unique lexical items’ is strictly linked to ‘learnability’, that is to say the ease or difficulty with which a particular word is learned (Bogaards and Laufer 2004, p. x). There are words which are more difficult to learn and this may depend on many factors. A word which is a cognate in a learner’s L1 may have a low frequency of usage but it may present no difficulty in learning. Conversely, a word that is frequent in L2 but has no direct linguistic and semantic counterpart in L1 is hard to understand and acquire (ibid.) and, therefore, to be selected in the translation process. This means that the limited use of unique lexical items in translated texts strictly depends on the level of specialisation of the translator. Translated texts are, for the reasons described above, only partially adapted to the new target language and audience and this lack of adaptation also in terms of promotional strategies (Attention and Interest vs. Desire and Action) leads to the creation of tourist products which have lost part of their persuasive power and, for this reason, they will probably be less successful among the new audience. In the tourist domain and particularly when promotional strategies are activated, the basic concepts of localisation should also be taken into account. Localisation is the preparation of a product for a new locale, that is to say for a new set of linguistic, economic, and cultural parameters for the end-use of the product (Pym 2010, p. 121). The kind of equivalence involved in localisation is equivalence at sentence or phrase level together with equivalence at product function level (ibid., p. 133), which in the specific language of tourism would imply either readers become tourists and visit the destination advertised or they do not. Pym (ibid.) defines this

174

Chapter Four

equivalence “standardised, artificial, the creation of a purely technical language and culture, in many cases the language of a particular company”, particularly because localisation intersects with technology when products are also internationalised. There are two alternatives to achieve this type of equivalence (ibid., p. 134): 1. multilingual contents may be strongly centralised and reproduced in all target languages in a process of ‘standardization’ of localisation projects; 2. contents may be highly adapted to the specific norms and tastes of the target locales, on the basis of a decentralised ‘diversification’ approach to multilingual communication. However, localisation also implies moments in which equivalence is put aside by strategies such as addition, omissions, and cultural adaptations which transform the product at various degrees. Translation seems to occupy a small part in the localisation process, where, thanks to or because of technology, it is turned into what Pym defines a “dehumanised phrase replacement” (ibid., p. 136). When dealing with tourist products, both standardisation and diversification should be applied in the process of re-shaping for an international audience. Standardisation should be applied in the way language is used, particularly in terms of lexical and syntactic patterning. Typical patterning should be much preferred to untypical ones in order to avoid risks such as non-accessibility to the product contents with implications on the effectiveness of the promotion. A wrong collocation may be similarly understood but reduces and weakens the persuasive power of texts. Diversification should be achieved through a differentiated focus and emphasis on the different semantic fields constituting the promotion of the tourist products. Furthermore, importance should also be given to the choice of an evocative rather than of a concrete language (and vice versa) in the description of the destinations advertised. These aspects play a role of utmost importance in the degree of success of a tourist promotion. As Ulrych suggests (Ulrych and Murphy 2008, p. 9 and Ulrych and Anselmi 2006, p. 3), in today’s globalized world a great deal of our knowledge and experience of other cultures is mediated through various forms of translation, both oral and written, so that rewritings and translations function as “originals” for a vast majority of people for most of their lives. For this reason, the issue of how information and events are filtered and relayed, how, in a word, they are ‘mediated’ through rewriting is a matter for serious investigation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arnheim R. (1956). Art and Visual Perception: a Psychology of the Creative Eye. London: Faber and Faber. Baker M. (1992). In Other Words: A Coursebook on Translation. London: Routledge. —. (1993). “Corpus linguistics and translation studies: implications and applications”. In Baker, M., Francis, G., and Tognini-Bonelli, E., eds., Text and Technology: In Honour of John Sinclair. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins: 233-250. Baldry A. and Thibault P.J. (2006). Multimodal Transcription and Text Analysis. London: Equinox. Barthes R. [1970] (1975). S/Z: an Essay (R. Miller, transl.). New York: Hill and Wang. Bezemer J. and Jewitt C. (2010). “Multimodal analysis”. In Litosseliti L., ed., Research Methods in Linguistics. London: Continuum: 180-197. Biber D., Conrad S. and Reppen R. (eds.) (1998). Corpus Linguistics: Investigating Language Structure and Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bogaards P. and Laufer B. (2004). “Introduction” to Bogaards P. and Laufer B., eds., Vocabulary in a Second language. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins: VI-XIV. Blum-Kulka S. (1986). “Shifts of cohesion and coherence in translation”. In House J. and Blum-Kulka S., eds., Interlingual and Intercultural Communication: Discourse and Cognition in Translation and Second Language Acquisition Studies. Tübingen: Narr: 17-35. Brake T., Walker D.M. and Walker T. (1995). Doing Business Internationally: The Guide to Cross-Cultural Success. Burr Ridge: Irwin. Butt D., Fahey R., Feez S., Spinks S. and Yallop C. (2003). Using Functional Grammar: an Explorer’s Guide. Sydney: Macquarie University, National Centre for English Language Teaching and Research. Cappelli G. (2007). “Translating English verbs of cognitive attitude into Italian: the difficulties of mapping two apparently equivalent complex systems”. In Bertuccelli Papi M., Cappelli G. and Masi S., eds.,

176

Bibliography

Lexical Complexity: Theoretical Assessment and Translational Perspectives. Pisa: Plus Pisa University Press: 177-201. Castello E. (2001). Tourist-information Texts: a Corpus-based Study of four Related Genres. Padova: Unipress. Chesterman A. (2004). “Beyond the particular”. In Mauranen A. and Kujamäki P., eds., Translation Universals. Do they Exist?. Amsterdam: Benjamins: 33-49. —. (2010). “Why study translation universals?”. In Hartama-Heinonen R. and Kukkonen P., eds., Kiasm. Acta Translatologica Helsingiensia, vol. 1. Helsingfors: Helsingfors universitet: 38-48. Crompton J. (1979). “Motivations of pleasure vacations”. Annals of Tourism Research, 6 (4): 408-424. Cucchi C. (2015). “National cultures on European corporate homepages in English: a linguistic analysis”. International Journal of Business Communication: 1-35. Dann G. (1977). “Anomie, ego-enhancement and tourism”. Annals of Tourism Research, (4): 184-194. Dardano M. and Trifone P. (1997). La Nuova Grammatica della Lingua Italiana. Bologna: Zanichelli. de Mooij M. (2004). “Translating advertising. Painting the tip of an iceberg”. The Translator, vol. 10 (2): 179-198. de Mooij M., and Hofstede G. (2011). “Cross-cultural consumer behavior: a review of research findings”. Journal of International Consumer Marketing, 23: 181–192. Denti O. (2012). Cross-cultural Representations in Tourism Discourse: the Case of the Island of Sardinia. Cagliari: Master Aipsa Edizioni. Downing A. and Locke P. (2002). A University Course in English Grammar. London: Routledge. Eggins S. (2011). An Introduction to Systemic Functional Linguistics (2nd ed.). London: Continuum. Englund Dimitrova, B. (1997). “Translation ability and translatorial competence”. In Svane B., ed., Translation and Interpreting. Stockholm: Stockholms Universitet: 31-32. Favero P. (2007). “What a wonderful world!: on the touristic ways of seeing, the knowledge and the politics of the culture industries of otherness”. Tourist Studies, 7 (1): 51–81 Fennis B.M. and Stroebe W. (2016). The Psychology of Advertising (2nd ed). London, New York: Routledge. Firth J.R. (1968). “Linguistic analysis as a study of meaning”. In Palmer F.R., ed., Selected Papers of J.R. Firth. London: Longman Linguistics Library: 12-26.

Persuasion in Tourism Discourse: Methodologies and Models

177

Francesconi S. (2007). English for Tourism Promotion: Italy in British Tourism Texts. Milano: Hoepli. —. (2014). Reading Tourism Texts: a Multimodal Analysis. Bristol: Channel View Publications. —. (2016). “Green hypermodality: a social semiotic multimodal analysis of the ‘Green your house’ webpage”. In Palusci O., ed., Green Canada. Bern: Peter Lang: 251-264. Gries S.T. (2009). “What is corpus linguistics?”. Language and Linguistics Compass, 3: 1-17. Gudykunst W. B. and Ting-Toomey S. (1988). Culture and Interpersonal Communication. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Hall E.T. ([1976]1989). Beyond Culture. New York: Doubleday. Hall E. T. (1984). “The hidden dimensions of time and space in today’s world”. In Poyatos F., ed., Cross-cultural Perspectives in Nonverbal Communication. Toronto: C.J. Hogrefe. Halliday M.A.K. (1978). Language as Social Semiotics: the Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning. London: Edward Arnold. —. (1985a). Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Edward Arnold. —. (2004). An Introduction to Functional Grammar (3rd ed., revised by C. Mathiessen). London: Edward Arnold. Halliday M.A.K., and Hasan R. (1985b). Language, Context and Text: Aspects of Language in a Social-Semiotic Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hofstede G. (1980). Culture’s Consequences. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. —. (2001). Culture’s Consequences (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. —. and de Mooij M. (2010). “Convergence and divergence in consumer behavior: implications for international retailing”. Journal of Retailing, 78: 61 –69. Holsanova J., Holmqvist K. and Rahm H. (2006). “Entry points and reading paths on newspaper spreads: comparing a semiotic analysis with eye-tracking measurements”. Visual Communication, 5 (1): 6593. Holz-Männtäri J. (1984). Translatorisches Handeln. Theorie und Methode. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarium Fennica. House J. (1997). Translation Quality Assessment. A Model Revisited. Tübingen: Narr. Hsu C. H. C. and Huang S. (2008). “Travel motivation: a critical review of the concept’s development”. In Woodside A. G. and Martin D., eds., Tourism Management: Analysis, Behaviour and Strategy. Cambridge, MA: CABI Publishing: 14–27.

178

Bibliography

Katan D.M. (2004). Translating Cultures. An Introduction for Translators, Interpreters and Mediators. Manchester: St Jerome Publishing. Klaudy K. (1996). “Back-translation as a tool for detecting explicitation strategies in translation”. In Klaudy K. et al., eds., Translation Studies in Hungary. Budapest: Scholastica: 99–114. Kress G. and van Leeuwen T. (2001). Multimodal Discourse. London: Arnold. Kress G. and van Leeuwen T. (2006). Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (2nd ed). London: Routledge. Laviosa-Braithwaite S. (1996). The English Comparable Corpus (ECC): A Resource and a Methodology for the Empirical Study of Translation. Unpublished PhD thesis. UMIST, Manchester. Lemke J. (2002). “Travels in hypermodality”. Visual Communication, vol. 1 (3): 299-325. Lewis S.E. (1899). “Side talks about advertising”. The Western Druggist, vol. 21: 65-66. Liu J. (2013). “Visual images interpretive strategies in multimodal texts”. Journal of Language Teaching and Research, vol. 4 (6): 1259-1263. Louw B. (1993). “Irony in the text or insincerity in the writer? The diagnostic potential of semantic prosodies”. In Baker M., Francis G. and Tognini-Bonelli E., eds., Text and Technology: In Honour of John Sinclair. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: Benjamins: 157-176. Maci S. (2013). Tourism Discourse: Professional, Promotional and Digital Voices. Genova: ECIG. Mahlberg M. (2010). “Corpus linguistics and the study of nineteenthcentury fiction”. Journal of Victorian Culture, 15 (2): 292-298. Manca E. (2004). “The language of tourism in English and Italian: investigating the concept of nature between culture and usage”. ESP Across Cultures, vol. 1: 53-65. —. (2008). “From phraseology to culture: qualifying adjectives in the language of tourism”. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, vol. 13 (3): 368-385. —. (2012). “Translating the language of tourism across cultures: from functionally complete units of meaning to cultural equivalence”. Textus, vol. 1: 51-67. —. (2013). “Describing through the five senses. A contrastive sociocultural and linguistic analysis of Italian and British tourist websites”. In Manca E. and Bianchi F., eds., Tourism and Tourist Promotion around the World: a Linguistic and Socio-cultural Perspective. Lecce: Salento University Publishing: 109-124.

Persuasion in Tourism Discourse: Methodologies and Models

179

Mauranen A. (2000). “Strange strings in translated language. A study on corpora”. In Olohan M., ed., Intercultural Faultlines. Research Models in Translation Studies. Textual and Cognitive Aspects. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing: 119–141. Munday J. (2001/2008). Introducing Translation Studies. Theories and Applications. London, New York: Routledge. Newmark P. (1988). A Textbook of Translation. New York: Prentice Hall. Nida E. (1964). Towards a Science of Translating with Special Reference to Principles and Procedures Involved in Bible Translating. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Nida E., and Taber C. (1969). The Theory and Practice of Translation. Leiden: Brill. Nord C. (1997). Translating as a Purposeful Activity. Functionalist Approaches Explained. Manchester: St. Jerome. Prime N. (2003). “Cultural value”. In Rugimbana R. and Nwankwo S., eds., Cross-cultural Marketing. London: Thomson Learning: 3-24. Pym A. (2007). “Natural and directional equivalence in theories of translation”. Target, 19 (2): 271–294. —. (2010). Exploring Translation Theories. London, New York: Routledge. Reiss K. (1971/2000). Translation Criticism: Potential and Limitations. Categories and Criteria for Translation Quality Assessment (transl. E.F. Rhodes). Manchester: St Jerome. Reiss K., and Vermeer H.J. (1984). Grundlegung einer Allgemeinen Translationstheorie. Tubingen: Niemeyer. Ritchie J.R.B. (1984). “Assessing the impacts of hallmark events: conceptual and research issues”. Journal of Travel Research, 23 (1): 211. Scott M. (2012). WordSmith Tools version 6. Stroud: Lexical Analysis Software. Serianni L. (1988). Grammatica Italiana. Italiano Comune e Lingua Letteraria, Suoni, Forme, Costrutti. With the collaboration of A. Castelvecchi. Torino: UTET. Sinclair J. (1991). Corpus Concordance Collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —. (1996). “The search for units of meaning”. Textus, IX (1). Genova: Tilgher: 71-106. Singh N. and Pereira A. (2005). The Culturally Customized Website: Customizing Websites for the Global Marketplace. Burlington: Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann.

180

Bibliography

Strong E. (1925). The Psychology of Selling and Advertising. New York: McGraw-Hill. Stubbs M. (2007). “On texts, corpora and models of language”. In Hoey M., Mahlberg M., Stubbs M. and Teubert W., eds., Text, Discourse and Corpora. London: Continuum: 127-161. Taivalkoski-Shilov K. (2006). La Tierce Main. Arras: Artois Presses Université. Taylor C. R. (2005). “Moving international advertising research forward: a new research agenda”. Journal of Advertising, 34 (1): 7-16. Thurlow C. and Jaworski A (2011). “Tourism discourse: languages and banal globalization”. Applied Linguistics Review, vol. 2: 285–312. Tirkkonen-Condit S. (2004). “Unique items: over- or under-represented in translated language?”. In Mauranen A. and Kujamaki P., eds., Translation Universals. Do they Exist?. Amsterdam: Benjamins: 177– 184. Tognini Bonelli E. (2001). Corpus Linguistics at Work. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Toury G. (1980). In Search of a Theory of Translation. Tel Aviv: Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics. —. (1995). Descriptive Translation Studies and beyond. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: Benjamins. Ulrych M. and Anselmi S. (2006). “Towards a corpus-based distinction between language-specific and universal features of mediated discourse”. In Martelli A. and Pulcini V., eds., Investigating English with Corpora. Studies in Honour of Maria Teresa Prat. Monza: Polimetrica: 257- 273. Ulrych M. and Murphy A. (2008). “Descriptive translation studies and the use of corpora: investigating mediation universals”. In Taylor Torsello C., Ackerley K. and Castello E., eds., Corpora for University Language Teachers. Bern: Peter Lang: 141–166. Van Leeuwen T. and Jewitt C. (2001). Handbook of Visual Analysis. London: Routledge. Vermeer H. J. (1989/2004). “Skopos and commission in translational action”. In Venuti L., ed., The Translation Studies Reader, 2nd ed. London, New York: Routledge: 227-238. Venuti L. (1995). The Translator’s Invisibility. A History of Translation. London, New York: Routledge. Vinay J-P. and Darbelnet J. (1958/1972). Stylisitique Comparée du Francais et de l’Anglais: Méthode de Traduction. Paris: Didier. Virtanen T. and Halmari H. (2005). “Persuasion across genres: emerging perspectives”. In Virtanen T. and Halmari H., eds., Persuasion across

Persuasion in Tourism Discourse: Methodologies and Models

181

Genres: a Linguistic Approach. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins: 3-24. Young Ok L. (2003). “Persuasive expressions for tourism promotion through the Internet”, paper presented at the WCA03 Conference, July 2003.