Abstract

Drawing on a corpus of eight texts in Italian and their corresponding English translations, this thesis explores one of the main representation modes of tourism discourse. Ever since their origin in the first half of the nineteenth century, guides have accompanied tourists to different destinations. By adopting a semiotic approach, the first part investigates the narrative dimension of tourist guides and seeks to unveil the deep mechanisms which underlie the selection of certain aspects of a place. The guide construes the valorisation of a destination through carefully chosen descriptive material which makes a place attracting. The spatial representation is the expression of deep values which are converted into non-anthropomorphic actors, such as castles, churches, landscapes, natural parks, etc. Much of the persuasive force of tourist guides is due to the veridiction contract which is crucial to the construction of the ethos of the text. The second part investigates the relation between evaluation and persuasion through the notions of attribution and evidentiality. Finally, a comparison is drawn between occurrences of some stance adverbials in the Italian texts and their equivalents in the translated English texts in order to consider the various strategies applied by translators.

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