INVESTIGATING LOAN WORDS AND EXPRESSIONS IN TOURISM DISCOURSE: A CORPUS DRIVEN ANALYSIS ON THE BBCTRAVEL CORPUS

Abstract

The concept of language contact has been investigated by linguists and researchers in many domains, textual genres and languages (Yule, 1996; Cortese and Hymes 2001; Pinnavaia 2001; Carstairs McCarthy, 2002; Kennedy, 2003; Matthews, 2005), and associated with numerous different communicative situations, forms, and functions related to the use of foreign words in a text. However, the definition of language contact emerging from all these studies is not always a clear-cut one, since there is often an overlap of situations which can describe the presence of foreign words in a text, and the same process of linguistic borrowing is under constant evolution due to social and cultural changes in the relation between host and foreign languages or in the conceptual evolution of a particular topic. The following paper will discuss these numerous implications in one specific linguistic domain, namely the language of tourism. After a brief account of the theoretical framework related to this phenomenon (Dann, 1996; Cappelli, 2013), the paper will present the results of a corpus driven analysis carried out on an English corpus of travel journalism, with the aim of identifying the most significant contexts of employment of this linguistic technique and its functions. The study will focus in particular on the relationship between the use of foreign terms to indicate specific topics and destinations described in the texts of the corpus and their related discursive environments, in order to investigate whether loan words and expressions may be considered a pragmatic marker of social attitude in tourist discourse underlining implied different approaches towards specific themes and destinations.