Tourism Destination Image, Tourism Discourse and UNESCO sites: a contrastive analysis

The purpose of this paper is to analyse tourism discourse - i.e. English as specialised and promotional discourse in the tourism field (Dann 1996, Gotti 2006, Maci, 2013) – as it is applied on websites promoting UNESCO sites in Sicily and in Malta. The consequent Tourism Destination Image (Crompton 1979; Echtner & Ritchie 1991) conveyed by the websites will also be investigated. A mixed methodological approach, both qualitative and quantitative, has been adopted. More specifically, the Corpus Linguistics approach has been privileged (Teubert 2005; Nigro 2006). The websites considered concern five UNESCO sites in Sicily and five UNESCO sites in Malta in a comparative study; both corpora of w…