The analysis of tourism discourse on the material of contemporary irish travel magazines, blogs and advertising brochures

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Ivan Franko National University of Lviv

The analysis of tourism discourse on the material of contemporary irish travel magazines, blogs and advertising brochures

Makaryshyn N.O.

The paper aims to highlight certain aspects of the study of tourist discourse on the material of Irish travel magazines, blogs and advertising brochures. The relationship of the tourism discourse with the system of other institutional types of discourse is also covered in the paper. It was found that the tourist discourse is the closest to the advertising discourse from the standpoint of the peculiarities of their construction and communicative goals. The interdisciplinary nature of tourism discourse and its peculiarities are analyzed. A closer look at the texts through a corpus-based study helps us to understand the way the discourse of tourism operates. The interaction of linguistics and sociology, anthropology, geography and political science is shown. The role of language, in particular lexical choices in tourism texts, syntactic structures and stylistic devices in the system of tourism is investigated. It is shown how the tourism discourse in Ireland forms an idea of the country, its history, modern times and Irish identity. In order to study the linguistic choices used in Irish travel magazines, blogs and advertising brochures, we compiled a corpus of texts selected from 50 websites connected to the domestic tourism in Ireland targeted at English-speaking people from Ireland and beyond.

We aimed to analyze the distribution of such lexical items as Ireland, Irish, land, traditional and tour. A text analysis software program called Sketch engine enabled us to study the grammatical and collocational behavior of particular lexemes. Our findings are presented in the tables and interpretation of the data is given. The regularity of Irish words that appear in modern travel magazines and blogs in Ireland as well as the functions of Irish words used within the discourse of tourism in Ireland are studied. The conclusions we draw in this paper serve as a starting point for new hypotheses. Our article yet does not analyze spoken and visual texts, which apparently provides a unique resource for researching the field of tourism. Thus, the analysis of relevant video blogs could be the subject of our further studies, as we see that the discourse of tourism is a fertile groundfor a critical analysis. Registering and analyzing video blog movements can also reveal more about the dynamics of this global multilingual discourse.

Key words: Ireland, corpus study, tourism discourse, institutional types of discourse, communication.

Макаришин Н. О. Аналіз туристичного дискурсу на матеріалі сучасних ірландських туристичних журналів, блогів та рекламних брошур.

У статті висвітлено деякі аспекти вивчення туристичного дискурсу на матеріалі ірландських туристичних журналів, статей, флаєрів, блогів тарекламних брошур. Описано взаємозв'язок туристичного дискурсу із системою інших типів інституційного дискурсу. З 'ясовано, що туристичний дискурс є найбільш близьким до рекламного дискурсу з позицій особливостей їхнього конструювання та комунікативних цілей. Окреслено міждисциплінарний характер туристичного дискурсу та його особливості. Засвідчено взаємодію лінгвістики та соціології, антропології, географії та політології. Досліджено роль мови, зокрема лексичного наповнення текстів, синтаксичних структур, послідовності фразу системі туризму. Показано, як підмова туризму в Ірландії формує уявлення про країну, її історію, сучасність та ірландську ідентичність. Аналіз вибраних текстів у межах корпусного дослідження лінгвістичних одиниць, використовуваних в ірландських туристичних журналах, щоденниках та рекламних брошурах, посприяв розумінню того, як функціонує дискурс туризму загалом. З 'ясовано, що туристичний дискурс має чітко визначене завдання - зменшити дистанцію між повідомленням та свідомістю туриста, поєднує ознаки усного мовлення та письмового тексту, а також продуктивно використовує візуальні засоби комунікації, такі як графічні дизайни, ілюстрації, цифрові анімації тощо. Корпус текстів складено із 50 веб-сайтів, пов 'язаних із внутрішнім туризмом в Ірландії. Вибрані тексти орієнтовані на англомовних читачів з Ірландії, а також за її межами.

Особливу увагу зосереджено на вживання лексичних одиниць Ірландія, ірландський, земля, традиційний та тур. Програма для аналізу текстів під назвою Sketch engine уможливила дослідити особливості та частоту вживання певних лексем (висновки представлені в п'ятьох таблицях із нашими поясненнями результатів корпусного аналізу). Досліджено регулярність вживання ірландизмів, що з'являються в сучасних туристичних журналах Ірландії, а також подано аналіз функцій, які вони виконують у даному типі дискурсу.

Ключові слова: Ірландія, корпусна лінгвістика, туристичний дискурс, типи інституційного дискурсу, комунікація.

Introduction

Defining the problem and argumentation of the topicality of the consideration. Modern epoch is characterized by the significantly increased intensity of human communication, an activity aimed at transmitting and receiving a certain message. In such a process, the text serves as a source of information for the communicator. One of the spheres of communication, along with architecture, art and other human activities, widespread in the modern world, is tourism.

The rapid development of the tourism industry has stimulated active research in the domain of tourism discourse. The topicality of the study is proved by the fact that the tourism industry continues to evolve: more and more tour operators, travel agencies, travel offers and deals are emerging, covering more and more countries and involving a huge number of people who communicate with each other in oral and written forms. In this regard, in modern linguistics there is a need to study a new institutional type of discourse - tourism. Tourism discourse includes textual components that have both linguistic and non-linguistic parameters, which are functionally interconnected. The study of tourism discourse is of functional and semantic character; it is inherently anthropocentric and interdisciplinary.

Analysis of recent research and publications. Tourism discourse is researched in the works ofA'Beckett, Monika Bednarek, G. Dann, Judith Kaplan-Weinger, Dean MacCannell and the anthropology of tourism is presented in the works of Edward M. Bruner, Scott McCabe and others. However, there are a number of questions related to tourism discourse that have not received proper coverage yet, which also determines the relevance of studying this area.

Setting the goals and tasks of the article. The aim of our paper research is to study the discourse of tourism on the material of Irish travel magazines, blogs and advertising brochures. To achieve this goal, the following research questions were posed:

1) What defines the concept of tourism discourse?

2) What place does it occupy in the system of other institutional types of discourse?

3) How regularly do Irish words appear in modern travel magazines and blogs in Ireland? What functions do they perform?

Methodology. The sources of language material for this work are texts from specialized magazines, advertising brochures, articles, leaflets, electronic publications in English, which are compiled in a corpus using the software Sketch Engine. We find it to be a reliable software program, since Sketch Engine has been used by major British or other publishing houses for producing dictionaries such as Macmillan English Dictionary, Dictionnaires Le Robert, Oxford University Press or Shogakukan [9].

Research material consists of travel blogs and websites in the amount of 50 items. An attempt to analyze the distribution of the lexical units Ireland, Irish, traditional, land and tour is made. Our findings concerning the distributions of most frequently used collocations are presented in the tables and support the hypothesis stated in the research questions. We have used the statistical method, the method of structural analysis and data analysis to carry out our research.

The outline of the main research material

Discourse is a polysemantic linguistic term that is used in various meanings that are almost homonymous. Some definitions include: “1) a coherent text; 2) oral and spoken forms of the text; 3) a dialogue;

1) a group of statements related to each other in meaning;

2) a speech work - written or oral” [2, 53].

In terms of our research, it is significant to define a discourse as “meaning the totality of codified language (i.e., vocabulary) used in a given field of intellectual enquiry and of social practice, such as legal discourse, medical discourse, religious discourse, etc. [6]. Institutional discourse refers to verbal exchanges between two or more people where at least one speaker is a representative of a work-related institution and where the interaction and the speakers' goals are partially determined by the institution in play [7, 43].

In linguistic studies the term “tourism discourse” is used for any speech that is realized in the subject area of tourism. Tourism discourse is a special subtype of advertising discourse aimed at capturing attention, maintaining interest, creating a desire to visit certain places, and finally taking an action and visiting them. In order to fulfill these functions, specific advertising techniques are used to shape people's behavior. It includes text components that have both linguistic and non-linguistic parameters, which are functionally related to each other. Tourism discourse is reflected in the organization of holidays, which includes lodging and accommodation, means of transport, leisure activities, geographical descriptions of the area, various types of entertainment, tours, etc. Thus, an attractive image of a particular program should be created to evoke people's interest in purchasing it.

According to Cook, “the purpose of tourism discourse is to manipulate the opinions of the addressees in order to form certain intentions and attitudes and to motivate certain reactions” [3, 12]. The main participants in tourism discourse are tour operators, host representatives, consumers of tourism services (tourists), tour guides, etc. lexical tourism ireland syntactic

The place of tourism discourse among other institutional types of discourse

The tourism discourse is of an advertising nature. However, comparing advertising and tourism discourse, one can find certain differences of a verbal and non-verbal nature. For example, standard advertising may not always offer sufficiently suitable illustrations, while in tourism discourse time-tested attractive objects are often used, such as photographs of The Cliffs of Moher, which is Ireland's most visited natural attraction or the Wild Atlantic Way with breathtaking views that definitely catch readers' attention. In terms of the use of linguistic choices, the attention of the addressee is drawn by:

1) catchy headlines (“Ireland has a story to sell”, “Start exploring the liquid gem that is the Fermanagh Lakelands”);

2) slogans (“My goodness, my Guinness”, Brennan's bakery “Today's bread, today”);

3) the name of the programs (Irish fairy tale, Irish Elegance, Enchanting Emerald Isle, Magnificent Wild Atlantic, Wild Irish experience, Unforgettable Ireland, etc.);

4) lexico-stylistic and hypersyntactic means of creating and organizing special texts. We have found a wide range of examples of imperative constructions and simple present tense sentence, for instance, Catch and hold your travel dreams, Feel the travel excitement, We continue on to explore the historic Viking City of Waterford where we visit The Waterford Crystal Visitor Centre. The purpose for using such linguistic choices is to make the time of the holiday seem still and everlasting.

Given the prideful culture as well as the peculiarities of the tourism discourse, Irish slogans, headlines, article titles and the names of tourist programs are often emphatic and lively.

In addition to advertising discourse, tourism discourse has a connection with historical discourse. Historical discourse is characterized by a rigorous selection of facts and accounting of historical data. And this, in turn, is part of a standard guidebook.

Tourism discourse is associated with art history discourse, since they both are quite resistant to non- linguistic changes. Art history and tourism discourse use conceptualization, general strategies and such lexical and grammatical features as special terminology, bookishness, numerous cliched forms. At its core though, tourism discourse carries signs of everyday discourse.

The existing lexical, structural and thematic features of the texts of tourism discourse allow us to consider them as a special information genre. Tourism discourse is exploring new territories more and more. Thus, tourism discourse, having its non-linguistic basis, can apparently be analyzed separately from a linguistic perspective.

Current trends. We have attempted to carry out the distributional analysis of the lexical units Ireland, Irish, land, traditional and tour and have drawn the following conclusions schematically presented in the tables. Since we have chosen articles published within the last 2 years, we can make a claim that they reveal contemporary trends in the discourse of tourism. A bright example is the frequent usage of the “top 10s”, “top 5s”, etc. lists as they point out ultra-modern tourism products. By including a place in their “top ten” or “top five” lists, travel writers imprint a new higher status to these destinations. We have seen a wide range of articles called “The Top 10 Ireland attractions that first time visitors should add to their Ireland trip”, “25 Photos that will make you want to visit Dublin”, “Irish Bucket List: 25 best things to do in Ireland before you die', “7 TopRated Tourist Attractions in Ireland”, “20 Must-Visit Attractions in Ireland”, “55 Cool and Unusual Things to Do in Ireland”. Numbers might vary from 5 to 155 in our case, but the message and its function remains the same - to persuade a reader to visit these places. In the majority of cases travel writers mention the same most popular sightseeing spots in the country, namely The Cliffs of Moher, The Ring of Kerry, Guinness Storehouse in Dublin, Killarney National Park, Sliabh Liag (Slieve League), Skellig Michael and others. We have noticed that widely-known sights become sophisticated or “gourmetized” and are presented as off-the-beaten-track destinations to make a tourist book a tour. The concept of a gourmet product, which was primarily associated with the culinary arts, has thus expanded to tourism, where we speak about the “gourmetization” of places.

Another tendency that can be traced only in the recent years is that nowadays anyone can be a travel writer. If in the past writers and editors were professionals who possessed expert knowledge, today's travel writers are people from different backgrounds and education levels.

Textual analysis through a corpus study has shown that the majority of texts pertain to an informal style through the use of idioms (e.g. “have the craic” for having fun in Irish English) slang expressions (“an Irish slap- up meal”, meaning large and sumptuous), contractions (e.g. you'll see, we've prepared), and abundant cultural references. Cultural references used in the analyzed articles usually do not have their direct equivalents in English and are mentioned in Irish, but sometimes they are used in order to induce a sense of the exotic.

Learn a chpla focail (meaning a few words) of Irish on board this Gaeltacht tour.

Failte Ireland (meaning welcome to Ireland, which is the official corporate tourism trade website in Ireland)

It is also a perfect viewing point for the Donegal islands Arainn Mor and Gabhla.

The one-day Gaeltacht tour; of the Sliabh Liag Peninsula.

Laurence Donaghy's Folk'd trilogy riffs off the old myths of the Tuatha de Danann and transports us to modern Belfast.

Place names as well as mythological elements and deities are often written in Irish, as in the examples of Tuatha de Danann, a supernatural race in Irish mythology or Arainn Mor (English name Arranmore), an island off the west coast of County Donegal.

Lexical choices to comply with the tourist's expectations about holidaying are also widely used in the discourse of tourism. Our corpus study has shown that such positive adjectives, superlatives and keywords as adventure, history, holiday, vacation, gem, pleasure, fabulous, marvellous, great, luck, the most, the best, etc. often serve as collocates with Irish, Ireland, tour.

Table 1 Nouns and adjectives modified by Ireland

Table 2 Nouns and adjectives modified by Irish

Table 3 The most frequent collocates with land

Table 4 The most frequent collocates with traditional

Table 5 The most frequent collocates with tour

The most frequent collocates with land are cereal, agricultural, fertile, which reflects pride of the Irish for their fertile lands. The lexical units connect, dry, drab, speculation and confiscate used in connection to land claim that the famine entered people's memory and still remains a tense issue. Documentarian John Percival explains, the “famine became part of the long story of betrayal & exploitation which led to the growing movement in Ireland for independence” [4, 76].

Frequent collocates such as grazing and flat refer to the local landscape. Ireland is full of large areas of grazing, that is grasslands suitable for pasturage. The island's main geographical features include low central plains (flat, low-lying areas) surrounded by coastal mountains.

Ireland has been always frequently associated with music, wooden architecture, pub culture and peculiar cuisine. The corpus materials have shown that there are numerous Celtic festivals throughout the country, traditional Irish dances workshops, pub crawls. Irish travel writers often dedicate their articles to the Irish cuisine and provide recipes of traditional Irish dishes.

“Jack-o'-lantern” frequent distribution is connected to the fact that the majority of articles in our corpus were published in autumn. A jack-o'-lantern (or jack o'lantern) is a carved pumpkin, turnip, or other root vegetable lantern associated with Halloween. Its name comes from the phenomenon of a strange light flickering over peat bogs, called will-o'-the-wisp or jack-o'-lantern. The name is also tied to the Irish legend of Stingy Jack, a drunkard who bargains with Satan and is doomed to roam the Earth with only a hollowed turnip to light his way [8]. It is owing to Irish immigrants that Jack-o'-lantern Halloween tradition is celebrated in the United States.

The definition of “tour” according to Cambridge Dictionary: “a journey made for pleasure, especially as a holiday, visiting several different places in an area” [10]. Our corpus has shown that the most frequent collocates with tour are lexical units describing the type of tour from a standpoint of:

a) means of transport involved (bus, riding, horse, cycling, walking);

b) guidance (guide, self-guided, Eric (the tour guide's name), operator);

c) activity (interactive, birding, sightseeing, workshop, crawl);

d) place (storehouse, cliff, distillery).

Pub crawls in Ireland are growing in popularity with years and take new interactive formats. A pub crawl (sometimes called a bar tour, bar crawl or bar-hopping) is the act of drinking in multiple pubs or bars in a single night [5]. In Ireland there is a local tradition of a pub crawl in December called the “12 pubs of Christmas” in which participants try to drink one drink in 12 pubs while wearing Christmas clothes [1].

Self-guided tours are offered by travel agencies more and more, which is reflected in the frequent use of the term “self-guided tour” in our corpora. It can be explained by a rapid technological development in the past decade. Many tourist attractions provide suggestions, maps, instructions, directions, and items to see or do during self-guided tours Audio tours are frequently presented in a self-guided format using booklets, smart phones or standalone handheld devices, as are virtual tours.

Conclusions and directions for further research in this area

Following the objectives of our paper, we have defined the concept of tourism discourse and its main features and can conclude the following:

1) tourism discourse is a separate subtype of institutional discourse with its own subject area;

2) tourism discourse is most closely associated with advertising and historical-geographical discourse;

3) it is mostly aimed at capturing attention, maintaining interest, creating a desire to visit certain places, and finally persuading people to take actions.

Having analyzed the regularity of Irish words that appear in modern travel magazines and blogs in Ireland, we can make a claim that they are not very numerous, since the target audience does not speak Irish in the majority of cases. The use of Irish lexemes mostly performs the function of inducing a sense of the exotic.

Considering that the sphere of tourism is a dynamically developing area, the study of tourism discourse proves to be a promising direction for modern linguistics. It serves the basis for the development of methods and ways to popularize cultural and diverse scientific information among people. Thus, we wish to pursue the study of tourism discourse on the material of Irish video blogs, since this question has not been thoroughly addressed yet.

Literature

1. “An Irish guide to the 12 Pubs of Christmas”. URL: https://www.irishcentral.com/culture/craic/an-irish-guide-to-the- 12-pubs-of-christmas

2. Baker P and Sibonile E. Key Terms in Discourse Analysis. 1-st ed. Bloomsbury Academic, 2011. 242 p.

3. Cook G. The Discourse of Advertising (2nd ed.). London: Routledge, 2001. 272 p.

4. Percival J. The Great Famine: Ireland's Potato Famine 1845-51. Diane Publishing Company, 1995. 192 p.

5. Pescio M. Livin' Local: Vegas Cycle Pub - A Pedal Powered Pub Crawl. URL: http://www.zipcodemagazines.com/ vegas-cycle-pub-pedal-powered-pub-crawl/

6. Rastier F. (ed.). “A Little Glossary of Semantics”. Texto! Textes & Cultures (Electronic journal). URL: http://www.revue-texto.net/Reperes/Glossaires/Glossaire_en.html#discourse

7. Tracy K., Ilie C. & Sandel T. (eds.). Institutional Discourse. The International Encyclopedia of Language & Social Interaction. Boston: John Wiley & Sons, 2015. P 809-826.

8. The History of 'Jack-O'-Lantern'. URL: https://www.history.com/news/history-of-the-jack-o-lantern-irish-origins

9. Using Computational Lexicography for Dictionary Production with the Sketch Engine. REF Impact Case Studies. University of Brighton. URL: https://impact.ref.ac.uk/casestudies/CaseStudy.aspx?Id=39760

Dictionaries

10. Cambridge Dictionary. URL: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/tour

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