The Discourse of Tourism and National Heritage

The Discourse of Tourism and National Heritage: A Contrastive Study from a Cultural Perspective presents an in-depth research study in the field of online tourism promotion. It focuses on the national online promotion of UNESCO World Heritage Sites, on two different types of websites--institutional and commercial--from three countries, Romania, Spain and Great Britain. The book analyses the way in which each country presents its national landmarks and combines various modes to create a virtual brochure with a promotional message from both institutional and commercial positions. In doing this, it studies the organization of the websites and their webpages, as well as the lexicogrammatical and visual features of their promotional messages. The theoretical framework used for the analysis is Systemic Functional Linguistics, particularly Halliday's theory of the metafunctions (1985, 1994; Halliday and Matthiessen 2004) and Kress and van Leeuwen's model of visual design (1996, 2006). The results of the different analyses are compared from two perspectives: namely, in relation to the types of websites and to the countries in which they were produced. These are further interpreted from a cultural perspective, showing that the findings can be accounted for by cultural variability, in particular the dimension of context (Hall 1976, 1990, 2000).