Citizen Tourism: A Cross-Linguistic Pragmatic Analysis of Online Travel Reviews
Giuliana Fiorentino, Maria Rosaria Compagnone
Abstract
The web 2.0. has profoundly transformed the way people participate in every aspect of our social, cultural, political and everyday life. One of the most studied aspects of this new participatory style of life is the citizen journalism (also known as public, democratic, participatory or street journalism). Citizen journalism is defined as ‘the gathering and reporting of news by ordinary people rather than professional reporters’, or ‘the act of private citizens playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting and discussing news and information’. In almost a decade something similar is going to happen in the communication of tourism. The web 2.0 has profoundly changed the tourist industry, and in a special way it has affected the habits of consumers (also called pro-sumers, as they at the same time produce and consume texts, services, and communication). Customer reviews of tourist sites and attractions are going to become a significant part of the communicative micro-system established between customers, tour operators and the owners of hotel, restaurants etcetera. In a previous research (Compagnone and Fiorentino, 2018) we have analyzed a corpus of Italian online reviews posted by customers on the most famous website for tourist reviewing, TripAdvisor. Focusing on Italian online reviews of some Italian hotels we were able to get some relevant results on the linguistic, textual and pragmatic aspects of this area of the language of tourism. In this paper we enlarge our corpus including English and French online reviews in order to approach the topic from a contrastive point of view. Our objective is now to analyze the French and the English reviews of the same hotels we have already considered in order to compare reviews of the same object so that also potential intercultural aspects of citizen tourism can be observed.