The Language of Tourism in New Travel Guides: Discursive Identities and Narratives

The considerable amount of texts which are produced in the tourism sector meets both the need of information of the tourist and the goals of the tourism industry. Hence the development of a language whose main characteristics are persuasion and evaluation, as clearly appears in leaflets and other promotional materials. On the other hand, genres such as the Travel Guide (TG) have conventionalised a directive type of discourse in which impersonality and accuracy of description represent the (semi)specialised trait of the text and the professional identity of the ‘expert on travel places’. Owing to the spread of tourism communication on the Internet, the borders between promotional and directive genres have become fuzzy, so much so that the whole amount of on-line materials are now converted into a sort of “diffused guide”. Moreover, communication is not carried out just ‘vertically’ any more (from specialist to non-specialist end users), but it unfolds horizontally, among tourists who alternatively interpret the role of the expert and mutually interact through the new digital genres. A great deal of recent research has been concerned with the peculiarities of the persuasive discourse observed in promotional websites of public and private institutions. Conversely, lesser attention has been paid to the transformations undergone by the TG genre, regarding several discourse aspects as well as macrostructural features which indicate increased fragmentation. Starting from a corpus of on-line documents which fit in the TG category, this paper aims is to outline some of the main evolutionary paths of this genre and to illustrate how the involvement of personal experience, among other constituent elements, contributes to the infringement of traditional conventions.