German and Italian Newsletters of Tour Operators : a Discourse Analysis

In the following paper, I compare German and Italian newsletters of tour operators (Gebeco, Studiosus and Marco Polo Reisen for German; Boscolo, EdenViaggi and Alpitour for Italian) by adopting the method of the discourse analysis. The corpus consists of 100 German newsletters and 100 Italian newsletters of the last years (2010 – 2015). It is to be defined as “Aussagenkorpus” (Niehr 2014: 35), i.e. a corpus of predications about specific themes (countries, cities, hotels, means of transportation etc.). These predications belong to texts, i.e. newsletters, which are related to other thematic associated texts such as travel guides, newspaper articles, and hotel presentations. This concept is based on the model of the discourse as an “Aussagenkorpus” realised in texts (Jung/Wengeler 1999: 147) and it assumes the idea of texts as intertexts. Newsletters are an interesting field of study according to following factors: - Lack of published studies: interlingual analysis of German and Italian newsletters in tourism field have not yet been published; - Multi-faced nature of newsletters: newsletters are types of texts, which are transversal. They can be used in the tourism communication by different kinds of organisations and institutions to give information, to propose new ideas and to persuade readers to buy a tourism product. They reflect the trends of tourism in a specific country (what art of tourism is preferred, e.g. green tourism, cultural tourism, horror tourism; what target, e.g. singles, families, young travellers). Moreover, they are good to analyse how the tourist as primary addressee is seen in the country (a tourist, a man of action, an aesthete or an ethnologist according to the categorization of Landowski 1996); - Cultural differences between German and Italian people as tourists: the language used is the direct reflection of the cultural differences between German and Italian tourists (e.g.: the Italian tourist is addressed with “tu”, the German with “Sie”). The analysis of the newsletters aims to answer following questions: 1. How does the German language consider the reader as tourist? Are there differences with the Italian language? 2. What cultural values are expressed in German and in Italian to persuade the reader? 3. Are emotional aspects of tourism experience more evident in German or in Italian? Bibliography Jung, M./Wengeler, M. (1999): Wörter – Argumente – Diskurse. Was die Öffentlichkeit bewegt und was die Linguistik dazu sagen kann. In: Stickel, G. (Hrsg.), Sprache – Sprachwissenschaft – Öffentlichkeit. De Gruyter, 143–171. Landowski, E. (1996): Stati di luoghi. In: Versus 73/74. Niehr, T. (2014): Einführung in die linguistische Diskursanalyse. WBG.