The Eco-tourist in Canadian and Italian national Parks

2013

The present paper aims to compare the image of the eco-tourist across languages and cultures, Canadian and Italian. An ad-hoc comparable corpus has been created from the official websites of National Parks which represent a kind of eco-tourist destination. The analysis attempts to trace a profile of Canadian and Italian eco-tourists Drawing upon the Functional Grammar (Halliday 1985) and addresses issues connected with Hall’s model (1983): Are Canadian and Italian ecotourism discourses shaped by their own cultural orientation, or do they attempt to speak in the tongue of the displaced tourist?