The language of tourism on the Web: an analysis of Tripadvisor reviews

The web has transformed every aspect of our social, political and cultural life and it has also changed the tourism industry and its communication. This dissertation aims to analyse the evolution of tourism text genres, from the traditional guidebook to the travel digital text, with a focus on a particular area of the language of tourism, that of online travel communities. Through the analysis of online reviews on TripAdvisor this research poses a number of significant questions for linguistic research: - To what extent online travel reviews could be considered as a part of the tourism discourse? - What features to online travel reviews share with other genres of tourism discourse? - Could we consider this particular area of tourism as a specific language, which relies on a set of standard and conventions? - What are these? - Which lexical features do tourists use mist to demonstrate satisfaction in online context? - Which lexico-grammatical features do tourists use more to demonstrate satisfaction in online context? Using a corpus-assisted approach, this study attempts to investigate the most common lexical and lexico-grammatical features used by tourists in the English language to describe their experiences about cultural attractions in Italy and to express their positive impressions. The work is carried out through the analysis of some reviews extracted from the website TripAdvisor, related to the main cultural sites of the city of Padua in Italy.