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Patricia Edwards Rokowski |
Tourism has become one of the
world’s major industries, moving as it does,
billions of Euros annually. Tourists, for their part, adventure
into traveling further away from home,
in addition to moving about more often
than ever before. Both of these motivational factors, economic and
social, require that the marketing of
products and services in the sector make use
of professional communication which is highly convincing in order
to effectively compete on the market.
The overall objective of this paper analyzes the special language used in tourist promotion in representative
examples, and that specifically
involving the manner in which the discourse of this genre addresses
the receiver, i.e. tourists. The
procedure for data collection is undertaken
within the framework of contemporary tourism promotion models from
various sources from all over the world
in order to establish a large, on-going
international corpus, which at present includes over 1200 samples.
The language used for transmission of
the messages, contained within the
sampling of the promotional material examined, project both
distinctive discourse features, as well
as recurring syntactical patterns, used in order to attract tourists towards the destinations marketed. Our
findings point towards the establishment of a symbiotic rapport between the sender, “we”, and the receiver, “you”,
with singular characteristics
particular to the messages in this text type. On the one hand,
suppliers address prospective consumer
- tourists as a collective target group (you
plural), with the express purpose of trying to reach and attract as
many potential customers as possible.
On the other hand, however, the tourists
themselves perceive the messages uniquely and individually (you
singular) as the discourse sparks an
interest, which fulfils their personalized needs and wants, a marketing concept referred to as ego targeting
(Williamson 1983). As a result, we
observe a particular dialogic structure involving “we”, the supplier of tourist activity, addressing
“you”, the potential patron of the
commercial offer (Boyer and Viallon 1994). Furthermore, specific
grammatical preferences tend to emerge
around the variations of address, namely
imperatives, interrogatives and modal forms (Marsano 1994) (Elgin 1993).
Nonetheless, and regardless of the channel of communication used, the illocutionary manifestation of the discourse
is marked by monologue (Vestergaard and
Schroder 1993). That is, the sender emits the messages in a one-way transmission, which rarely allows
the receiver the opportunity of verbal
exchange (Archdale, 1992). Taking exception to the unidirectional format traditionally found in advertising
and promotion is that which takes place
in Internet. Most usually, the web sites of tourist destinations around the world allow for and invite
visitors to contact an email address
provided on the web page. Thus, in the case in point, a kind of
belated dialogue that permits feedback
from the receiver to the sender is created,
challenging the otherwise unilateral transmission salient in most other promotional forms. To sum up, our study
exemplifies modern advertising and promotional use of discourse in addressing the needs and motivations of prospective
clients from a linguistic perspective
within the context of the tourist industry.