Comparing textual genres in Spanish: the case of the tourism domain

Abstract

Tourism is one of the most important specialized domains in Spain. For this reason, many linguistic studies related to tourism texts have been carried out in the last few years. In this work, we focus on three of the most frequent and difficult textual genres written in Spanish in this domain: the informative article, the travel blog post, and the rules and regulations (for tourist accommodation facilities). The goals of this research are two: a) to carry out a linguistic analysis of the three aforementioned genres from the tourism domain on the textual, lexico-grammatical and discourse levels to gain a comprehensive understanding of the features of these text types, and b) to compare these genres in order to identify statistically significant differences among them and show that some specific linguistic features are prototypical of each one. To achieve these goals, we compiled a corpus in Spanish comprised of texts corresponding to the analysed genres. Then, we analysed linguistic features from both a quantitative and qualitative point of view. Finally, we carried out a comparative analysis using statistical techniques that shed light on significant differences between the genres.