Language of Tourism: Corpus Analysis of Spoken Discourse of Tour Guides and Written Discourse of Tourist Guides

The language of tourism is almost omnipresent today. The more we travel, the more this language variety expands and develops. Each of us has probably bought and read a guidebook for a travel abroad, and has experienced a sightseeing tour with a tour guide. Each of us, especially when living close to a tourist destination, also often meets individual tourists equipped with a guidebook or gathered in a group led by a person carrying an umbrella above their head. A good tour guide as well as a good printed tourist guide serves as a ´tool´ which helps tourists get acquainted with an unknown environment and get accustomed to it. Is it possible to compare these two ´tools´ from the linguistic point of views? What are the differences between the spoken discourse of tour guides and written discourse of printed tourist guides? And are there any similarities? This book not only offers an analysis of features of spokenness and writtenness in both types of discourses from the linguistic point of view, but also describes their situational context, prevailing lexico-grammatical as well as syntactic features, and consequently analyzes the function of these features in given context.