From phraseology to culture

This paper aims to describe the phraseology associated with adjectives in the language of tourism. The adjectives appearing in the word list of a British farmhouse holidays corpus were grouped into three different semantic fields (‘description of rooms’, ‘description of surroundings’, and ‘description of food’) and from which their collocational profiles were then identified. In order to compare and contrast the Italian and the British languages of tourism, we searched an Italian comparable agriturismi corpus for items that are used to describe rooms, food, and surroundings. The results are discussed with reference to Sinclair’s theories on the influence of context and register on language choices (Sinclair 1991), and Hall’s theory of high vs. low context cultures (Hall 1976, 1989; Katan 2003). This analysis shows that the language of tourism is highly phraseological. It also gives insights into some differences and similarities between English and Italian in terms of ‘language systems’ and cultural orientations.