Discourse in Tourism
Topic: Investigating the Language of Tourism Discourse in Thailand Travel Brochure
Literature Review 1. Background Theory Tourism has become one of the most important businesses throughout the world and tourism discourse has become one of the most common public discourses, with millions of people taking part in its structure when entering a numerous of communicative situations. People, culture, landscape, history, traditions, and other social and natural entities have been offered and chosen, experienced and used, and at the same time talked and written about. The language used in tourism is a specific kind of language that corresponds to the specific position of tourism in the current society. Nelson Graburn (1977considers tourism as structurally necessary ritualized breaks in routine that identify and reduce the ordinary tourism as a functional equivalent of religion "The rhetoric of tourism is full of the manifestation of the importance of authenticity of the relationship between the tourists and what they see: this is a typical native house; this is the very place the leader fell; this is the actual pen used to sigh the law; this is the original manuscript; this is the authentic Tlingit fish club; this is a real piece of the true Crowns of Thorns." (MacCannell 1989, 14). In this information age, even though the tourism information are easily accessible, hard print travel brochures remain as popular as ever. The brochure is “the spatial representation of a tension between an individual and a targeted valuable object” (Greimas and Courtès 1979). Also, Leeuwen (2004) has classified travel brochures as “communicative acts”, which is replaced by “speech act”, which is limited to only spoken language. They are understood as “multimodal microevents in which all the signs present combine to determine its communicative intent” (van Leeuwen 2004: 8). According to Scollon and LeVine (2004: 1-2), “language in use is always and inevitably constructed
Literature Review 1. Background Theory Tourism has become one of the most important businesses throughout the world and tourism discourse has become one of the most common public discourses, with millions of people taking part in its structure when entering a numerous of communicative situations. People, culture, landscape, history, traditions, and other social and natural entities have been offered and chosen, experienced and used, and at the same time talked and written about. The language used in tourism is a specific kind of language that corresponds to the specific position of tourism in the current society. Nelson Graburn (1977considers tourism as structurally necessary ritualized breaks in routine that identify and reduce the ordinary tourism as a functional equivalent of religion "The rhetoric of tourism is full of the manifestation of the importance of authenticity of the relationship between the tourists and what they see: this is a typical native house; this is the very place the leader fell; this is the actual pen used to sigh the law; this is the original manuscript; this is the authentic Tlingit fish club; this is a real piece of the true Crowns of Thorns." (MacCannell 1989, 14). In this information age, even though the tourism information are easily accessible, hard print travel brochures remain as popular as ever. The brochure is “the spatial representation of a tension between an individual and a targeted valuable object” (Greimas and Courtès 1979). Also, Leeuwen (2004) has classified travel brochures as “communicative acts”, which is replaced by “speech act”, which is limited to only spoken language. They are understood as “multimodal microevents in which all the signs present combine to determine its communicative intent” (van Leeuwen 2004: 8). According to Scollon and LeVine (2004: 1-2), “language in use is always and inevitably constructed