Patterns and perspectives in the language of Italian and British walking holidays

This paper aims to contribute to the inter- and transdisciplinary research on adventure travel tourism by analysing the discursive patterns used in websites promoting walking holidays in Italy and the UK. The analysis focuses in particular on the investigation of the lexical, semantic and pragmatic choices which characterise this type of discourse and de-scribe how the interaction between authors and readers is achieved and how space is de-scribed in relation to participants. To reach this aim, a comparable corpus consisting of British and Italian websites advertising walking holidays has been assembled and investi-gated through analytical methods typical of Corpus Linguistics. Discursive patterns have been interpreted following the theoretical models of metadiscourse (Hyland, 2005) and spatial description (Taylor & Tversky, 1996; Levinson, 1996). Results shed light on the features of the promotion of British and Italian walking holidays with important applica-tions in the marketing domain.