Travelling without a trace: a corpus study of the communicative process of ‘eco-speaking’

The purpose of this research, which adopts mainly a corpus-based approach, is to analyse the specific discourse of ecotourism for material design. The idea of studying this register derives from the ever-increasing demand for more authentic and natural holidays, which has given birth to a niche market of tourism. The data derive from a specialized corpus, the English corpus of Ecotourism, which is being assembled at the University of Foggia under the name of “Green Corpus” and made up of British English and American English publications. This work is informed by the view that corpora can reveal patterns of usage not easily detectable through manual analysis and therefore, enable learners to observe directly a body of evidence pertaining to the linguistic features of specialized language domains, of which ecotourism is a case in point. In order to become a good user of LSPs two types of knowledge are required, linguistic and conceptual knowledge and corpora are useful resources for both, in terms of lexico-grammatical and stylistic features for the former and meaning for the latter. In investigating the linguistic patterns of eco-speaking, we will consider the lexical choices, their collocations and semantic prosody in order to define its domain and the typology of the offer. The preliminary findings show the complexity of the term ecotourism, the importance of authenticity and primitiveness conveyed by “green messages” and we point out how this register has properties of its own.