Tourist Behaviour

This chapter presents the analysis of tourist behaviour in non-translated tourism texts to reveal any cross-linguistic differences in the use of verbs where the reader-tourist is the explicit or implied subject/agent. The focus is on specific semantic categories of verbs which are most prominent in tourism discourse, their overall distribution, and how they are realised through specific verb choices. The examination of these categories reveals a unique profile for each language examined here: American English, British English, French, Greek, and Russian. This profile reflects how tourist behaviour, and tourism more generally, is conceptualised in each language, and secondly, and relatedly, the tourism phase that each culture is currently experiencing.