Exploring the difficulty of complex meaning relations in English tourist texts for teaching and learning purposes

This paper sets out to explore the difficulty and the inherent complexity of meaning relations occurring at the noun phrase level as well as in combinations of the verb ‘take (+ preposition) + noun phrase’ in a corpus of promotional tourist texts in English. In order to investigate both the comprehension and the translation difficulty of these complex meaning relations, the paper draws on the translations of concordance lines produced by a group of Italian university students of English. Finally, it discusses the main results and some implications for teaching, learning and researching English-Italian contrastive lexicogrammar.