Ibérica (Jan 2016)
Guías de viaje 2.0
Abstract
The guidebook has established itself as a codified and easily recognizable genre within tourism communication (Baider et al., 2004; Antelmi et al., 2007), characterised by a normative tone and an objective and impersonal style. In recent years, however, developments in digital technologies and the so-called Tourism 2.0 have contributed to a deep reconfiguration of this genre, bringing about significant changes in the textual patterns (Calvi & Mapelli, 2011; Sanmartín Saez, 2012) and in the relevance of the information transmitted in these texts (Yus Ramos, 2010). Furthermore, new forms of guidebooks have emerged where the user/traveler becomes the addresser of the tourist communication aimed at other travelers. This “recontextualisation” (Linell, 1998) of the guidebook has produced new hybrid genres that break traditional conventions by combining existing forms in new ways (Calvi, 2010), featuring cooperation among members of the community of travelers and fragmenting the contents into information microunits. This paper proposes a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the vocabulary and interpersonal metadiscourse (Hyland, 2005) in a diverse representative corpus (Biber et al., 1998) of different kinds of travel guides 2.0. These will be compared with traditional guides (Mapelli & Piccioni, 2011) and other informative promotional texts with a view to identifying the characteristics of the genre. The 0.5 million-word corpus will be analysed with the program AntConc 3.2.4 (Anthony, 2014)
