Tourism, language and globalization. A linguistic representation of St. Petersburg in Lonely Planet’s web site

Teaching foreign languages for specific purposes holds an importance that, at the present time, it is extended widely to the field of the tourism industry which uses natural languages to create a shared metalanguage. The languages used to describe a tourism destination are particularly interesting because they build up a tourism’s representation of the town in order to pilot the travellers’ choices. In this context, tour guides represent an interesting example because they offer to the learner-reader the possibility to explore the richness of a foreign language. This study proposes an analysis of St. Petersburg’s tourist guide contained in the Lonely Planet web magazine in the English language. This paper will analyze this web guide using a mixed approach, both cognitive linguistics and structural linguistics, in order to focalize the approaches of Lakoff (2008), Jackobson (1960), Genette (1989) and Nigro (2006). On one hand, the cognitive linguistics approach can analyze conceptual metaphors (Lakoff e Johnson, 1980), metonymies and personifications that influence the representation and the conceptualization of reality. On the other hand, it can investigate linguistic choices (technical words, keywords) used in the guide. Moreover, a digression is dedicated to the paratextual elements (titles, subtitles, introductions and targeted readers) because they represent the place where pragmatics and the action on the public have the duty to let the text be known (Genette, 1989 : 4). This analysis allows us to understand better the comprehension of linguistic choices in English language for specific purposes.