Classifying Tourism: cross-cultural evidence from corpus data

According to Dann, in current Western society, tourist choices are determined by personality, lifestyle, tourist-role, social class, and culture – the latter intended as “systems of beliefs, norms, values and sanctions, which ultimately guide [people’s] behaviour” (Dann, 1993: 105). Others, such as Pizam and Sussmann (1995: 904), point out that several studies based on direct or indirect methods of assessment suggest that nationality does influence tourist behavior, although it should certainly not be considered as the only factor. Starting from the belief that natural language is a mirror of national culture, this paper explores the working hypothesis that tourist preferences based on national culture can surface from the semantic analysis and comparison of large corpora revolving around ‘tourism’ in different languages. To this aim, three general Web corpora in different languages (British English, Italian, and Russian) – created by members of the Web-As-Corpus group – were used to extract three sub-corpora of 10,000 full sentences revolving around the node word tourism (turismo in Italian, and туризм in Russian). For each language, concordances of the node words were generated, sorted, and manually analysed, in order to highlight the linguistic labels for types of tourism. The labels thus identified were then grouped according to a hierarchical classification that organized labels into semantic fields and semantic fields into conceptual domains. The resulting classifications were compared at all of the three semantic levels, the contrastive approach being a fundamental element in order to identify cultural specificities. The present cross-linguistic comparison showed traces of globalisation, along with marked cultural specificities. Globalisation emerged when the same semantic fields (or sometimes labels) appeared in all the three corpora. On the other hand, the presence/absence of a specific label or field in a given corpus, or a marked difference in the number of labels within a given semantic field were considered indicators of cultural specificities on condition that a suitable explanation could be found in the history or traditions of the given culture or support came from evidence from other sources. In practice, cultural differences seemed to be frequently determined by the geographical, natural and historical situation of the country. Almost certainly, information of this type could also be retrieved in other ways, such as from expert informants for the given cultures, or from scientific or popular literature on the field. This, however, does not lessen the potential relevance of the current study, as it offers a further – and to our knowledge not yet applied method – for reaching the desired goal. Furthermore, the much wider number of labels retrieved in this study, compared to the number of labels found in dedicated and published classifications of tourism, testifies to the advantages of the use of corpora.