Tourism Destination Image, Tourism Discourse and UNESCO sites: a contrastive analysis

The purpose of this paper is to analyse tourism discourse - i.e. English as specialised and promotional discourse in the tourism field (Dann 1996, Gotti 2006, Maci, 2013) – as it is applied on websites promoting UNESCO sites in Sicily and in Malta. The consequent Tourism Destination Image (Crompton 1979; Echtner & Ritchie 1991) conveyed by the websites will also be investigated. A mixed methodological approach, both qualitative and quantitative, has been adopted. More specifically, the Corpus Linguistics approach has been privileged (Teubert 2005; Nigro 2006). The websites considered concern five UNESCO sites in Sicily and five UNESCO sites in Malta in a comparative study; both corpora of websites use English for their online communication. Each website has been analysed according to Dann’s theories (1λλ6) with a special focus on the verbal technique of keywords and on the property of the language of tourism concerning euphoria. The analysis was carried out through the exam of the occurrences of two specific lexico-grammatical features selected, namely: nouns and pre/post modifiers (Halliday 2004). The results of the analysis emphasise the different Tourism Destination Image conveyed by the two groups of UNESCO sites, in Malta and in Sicily, on the basis of the different linguistic choices adopted by the two sub-corpora.