“In fair Verona, where we lay our scene”. A multimodal analysis of the tourist gaze on Verona in travel blogs

The increasing presence and popularity of online travel blogs has recently added another layer to tourism discourse studies and to destination marketing, eliciting interest in research on user-generated content in tourism. Such blogs have been recognized as valuable sources of information as they are based on actual travel experiences; as a consequence, they can generate digital word-of-mouth communication to prospective visitors, potentially influencing their destination choices. This paper aims to investigate tourist perceptions and representations of Verona from a multimodal perspective, in order to explore the tourist gaze (Urry 1990) on the city, with an additional focus on its relation to the popular imagery of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. To this purpose, a number of blog entries about Verona from two travel blog platforms (TravelBlog, Travellerspoint) and individual non-professional blogs were analyzed, for a total of 100 entries published from 2010 to 2018. A quantitative-qualitative mixed approach will be adopted to analyze the language used in the blogs as well as the accompanying images, also drawing on Kress and van Leeuwen’s visual grammar model (2006).

Mapping the travel blog : a study of the online travel narrative

This thesis examines the discursive tension between travel and tourism and analyses how narrative techniques negotiate this in travel blogs. This discursive analysis uses various theories of narrative and self-presentation, particularly Bakhtin’s heteroglossia, polyphony, and speech genres, Goffman’s theories of self-presentation, and Graham Dann’s framework for tourist discourse. It finds that the underlying discursive tensions in travel blogs indicate a need for a more flexible approach to defining and analysing this form of communication

Gender, Advertising and Ethics: Marketing Cuba

Online advertisements are representations of ethnographic knowledge and sites of cultural production, social interaction and individual experience. Based on a critical discourse analysis of an online Iberia Airlines advertisement and a series of blogs, this paper reveals how the myths and fantasies privileged within the discourses of the advertising and travel industries entwine to exoticise and eroticise Cuba. The paper analyses how constructions of Cuba are framed by its colonial past, merging the feminine and the exotic in a soft primitivism. Tourism is Cuba’s largest foreign exchange earner and a significant link between the island and the global capitalist system. These colonial descriptions of Cuba create a rhetoric of desire that entangles Cuba and its women in a discourse of beauty, conquest and domination and have actual consequences for tourism workers and dream economies, in this case reinforcing the oppression of Afro-Cuban women by stereotyping and objectifying them

forms of hybridity in travel blogs

The technological revolution has changed considerably not only the way people travel and but also how they narrate their experiences. In this respect, the analysis of travel blogs can offer insights into the discursive and communicative practices which characterize this hybrid genre. This study is based on the investigation of a corpus of highly visited travel blogs and aims to observe their hybridity from a multitude of perspectives. More specifically, hybridity is seen in terms of genre, (a)synchronicity, collaboration, modes of communication and level of multimodality, style, orientation, levels of subjectivity and pragmatic functions. From a lexical perspective, specific attention is devoted to evaluative adjectives. In particular, the use of adjectives belonging to conceptual classes such as 'assessment' or 'deviance' is a widespread tool to express the blogger's subjectivity and may assume different communicative and pragmatic functions

Mediating Travel Writing, Mediated China: The Middle Kingdom in Travel Books and Blogs

This thesis looks at travel writing about China crossing three main research axes. The main one is represented by the comparison between Western-authored contemporary travel books and travel blogs. The majority of studies on Western travel writing about China focuses on pre-modern and modern texts, while much less attention has been dedicated to contemporary travelogues. At the same time, by projecting the genre onto the web, this study offers a mapping of the blogosphere and questions the literary and epistemological status of travel writing. Through a close reading analysis, the aim is to outline medial and rhetorical differences and similarities between travel books and blogs, particularly in terms of how China is represented, as well as the way in which travel writers perceive themselves. In this latter respect, interviews with travel authors and bloggers are also included. The second research axis explores the diachronic evolution of Western-authored travel books about the Middle Kingdom. Building on the findings of the first part of the thesis, the analysis looks at texts from the end of the 19th century throughout the 20th century, complementing the attention to pre-modern and modern travel accounts of earlier studies on travel writing about China. The goal is to understand if and how the genre and the representation of China have changed over the last century. The third axis is cross-cultural: in the last chapter a number of contemporary Chinese-authored travel accounts are analyzed. Referring to existing literature about Chinese travel writing, to be highlighted are the rhetorical and medial differences between “classic” and contemporary texts, as well as between books and blogs. Concerning the first research axis, findings suggest that Western travel books are more diversified generically speaking than travel blogs. Moreover, while the former provide a rather composite representation of the country, the latter are mainly devoted to deliver objectified touristic information. As for the second research axis, no substantial shifts were detected in the genre’s features, or in the way in which China has been represented in Western travel writing during the 20th century. Lastly, it is advanced that Chinese travel books are deeply politicized, while travel blogs tend to convey a contemplative representation of the country, more in the spirit of “classic” Chinese travel writing. However, differently from Western writers, both Chinese authors and bloggers manage to portray China from a variety of points of view

The Worldmaking Role of Sri Lankan Travel Writers: Negotiating Structure and Agency in the Study of Travel Representations

This study is a critical enquiry into the worldmaking agency of travel writers and the underlying social implications. It adds to knowledge on tourism as worldmaking in an understudied postcolonial context of Sri Lanka. Engaging in a scrutiny of the social role of an everyday activity associated with travel and tourism, this thesis addresses the following key questions: (1) Who are Sri Lankan travel writers? (2) How do they represent Sri Lanka through their writing? (3) What are the social mechanisms underlying these representations? Finally, (4) Why are these representations created the way they are? The study primarily presents three distinctive ways locally produced travel writing in English represents Sri Lanka within tourism promotion, journalism and finally through the perspective of independent local travellers. As such, it broadens insights on the tourist gaze through the examination of three distinctive gazes: the promotional gaze, the journalistic gaze and the activist gaze constructed by local writers. Upon presenting the three resultant versions of representations and their worldmaking power, the thesis then enquires critically into the social intricacies underlying this production process. This is built upon the premise that worldmaking representations are contingent not so much upon initiation or illusion but ‘inculcation’. This is undertaken using the Bourdieusian field of cultural production. It applies the conceptual triad habitus, capital and field whereby the cultural histories including education, lifestyles habits, interests and tastes of writers are examined combined with constraints imposed by various fields they are positioned within society. Consequently, the thesis demonstrates the interplay between external social pre-arrangements underlying the construction of travel representations and the subjectivity of writers, extending knowledge on the critical link between worldmaking agency, the English language and social class. In that, this thesis contributes to the critical tourism studies paradigm by affording a compelling alternative to negotiating the duality between structure and agency in the study of travel representations and their worldmaking power within the particular context of Sri Lanka

Specialised Languages and Multimedia. Linguistic and Cross-cultural Issues

none2noThis book collects academic works focusing on scientific and technical discourse and on the ways in which this type of discourse appears in or is shaped by multimedia products. The originality of this book is to be seen in the variety of approaches used and of the specialised languages investigated in relation to multimodal and multimedia genres. Contributions will particularly focus on new multimodal or multimedia forms of specialised discourse (in institutional, academic, technical, scientific, social or popular settings), linguistic features of specialised discourse in multimodal or multimedia genres, the popularisation of specialised knowledge in multimodal or multimedia genres, the impact of multimodality and multimediality on the construction of scientific and technical discourse, the impact of multimodality/multimediality in the practice and teaching of language, the impact of multimodality/multimediality in the practice and teaching of translation, new multimedia modes of knowledge dissemination, the translation/adaptation of scientific discourse in multimedia products. This volume contributes to the theory and practice of multimodal studies and translation, with a specific focus on specialized discourse.Rivista di Classe A - Volume specialeopenManca E., Bianchi F.Manca, E.; Bianchi, F

English as a Lingua Franca for Tourism: A Pragmatic Study in the Italian Context

This thesis is a pragmatic study of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) communication in the special language domain of tourism. It explores overt, covert, and translanguaging practices to define how they foster communicative functions. Furthermore, the multiculturality of the research community object of the study will provide evidence of an original human cluster defined as an intercommunicating group of speakers (IGS). Capturing their stance-taking towards English as a Lingua Franca use will contribute to clarifying its iconic social meaning (Coupland 2007). The study adopts an ethnographic perspective to exemplify the dynamic nature of negotiation in language interaction and the power and cultural relations behind it. Furthermore, it combines the Ethnography of Communication with a microanalytic approach - Conversation Analysis. The triangulation of data deriving from an emic point of observation with an etic one detailed the speakers’ multilingual complex and expanded linguistic repertoire (Cogo 2012). It has also acknowledged their attitudes and orientations towards ELF communication, including the central aspects of stance-taking. In detail, my original data includes naturally occurring conversations among the 22 participants in the tour, comprising specialist tourist staff operators of different ages and educational backgrounds and non-expert visitors. The analysis was supported by interviews and questionnaire surveys conducted among participants (for their transcriptions and detailed analysis, see Parise 2022). In conclusion, this investigation explores ELF communication in an Italian tourism context to support Jenkins’s (2015) multilingual view of ELF communication. Conceivably, it will provide evidence of the strategic and dynamical use of speakers’ multilingual repertoires used as pragmatic strategies (i.e., the pedagogical function, the interpersonal function, the interpreting function) to accomplish complex social and cognitive activities in the Italian Tourist Industry. Furthermore, the investigation longitudinal participant-observation perspective allowed to define the participants as an intercommunicating group of speakers (IGS) since stabler than a TIG (transient international group)1 (see Pitzl 2016a: 25) or an example of TMC (Transient Multilingual Communities)2 (see Mortensen and Hazel 2017: 256), but more transient than a CoP in Wenger’s sense (1998). Finally, their stance observation will contribute to sociolinguistic theory investigating individual speaker/group dynamics