Cambridge Scholars Publishing The Discourse of Tourism and National Heritage: A Contrastive Study from a Cultural Perspective

The Discourse of Tourism and National Heritage: A Contrastive Study from a Cultural Perspective presents an in-depth research study in the field of online tourism promotion. It focuses on the national online promotion of UNESCO World Heritage Sites, on two different types of websites – institutional and commercial – from three countries, Romania, Spain and Great Britain. The book analyses the way in which each country combines various modes to create a virtual brochure with a promotional message from both institutional and commercial positions. In doing this, it studies the organization of the websites and their webpages, as well as the lexico-grammatical and visual features of their promotional messages. The theoretical framework used is Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday 1985, 1994; Kress and van Leeuwen 1996, 2006; Halliday and Matthiessen 2004). The results are compared in relation to the types of websites and to the countries in which they were produced. These are further interpreted from a cultural perspective, showing that the findings can be accounted for by cultural variability, in particular the dimension of context (Hall 1976, 1990, 2000). Review "Stoian’s thorough and exhaustive study is an interesting contribution to the understanding of multimodality in tourism discourse that will hopefully inspire further investigations into the realm of online branding."Maria Cristina PaganoniUniversità degli Studi di MilanoIbérica 34 (2017)"The study provides a better understanding of both how language and image interact with others, to represent and compose meaning, and the different cultural and contextual communication styles which can make the online promotion of tourism more successful. Results may be immediately applied to domains such as online promotion, tourism discourse and its strategies, or intercultural communication, but could also provide new insights in multimodal theory and methodology."Morten BoeriisAssociate Professor, Centre for Multimodal Communication, Institute for Language and Communication, University of Southern Denmark"This is a very close, detailed study of texts and visuals in tourism websites, institutional and commercial, focused on World Heritage Sites in three different countries and cultures: Romania, Spain and Great Britain. The analytical approach is based on Systemic Functional Linguistics and on its extension to visual semiotic artefacts. The aim is to explore possible differences in the ways in which the websites construe the activity of promoting tourist sites, and to relate these to differences in the cultural contexts in which the websites are produced and consumed."Geoff ThompsonHonorary Senior Fellow, School of English, University of Liverpool"The author successfully combines semiotics, text linguistics, semantics, intercultural communication, cultural studies, and of course, discourse analysis, to offer some very useful tools and models for the analysis of websites."Daniel Dejica-Carțiș Associate Professor, University Politehnica of Timisoara About the Author Claudia Elena Stoian received her PhD in Applied Linguistics from the University Autónoma of Madrid, Spain. She currently teaches Translation, Discourse Analysis, and English as a Foreign Language at the University Politehnica of Timisoara, Romania, and is working as a translator of English, Spanish and Romanian. She has published several papers on discourse analysis and cultural differences.