Anglicismi nella comunicazione turistica online

Emmanuela E. Meiwes, Università degli Studi di Perugia

emmanuela.meiwes(at)unipg.it

Abstract: In the field of tourism, verbal communication is considered by many a specialized discourse (Calvi 2000, Gotti 2006, Gotti et al. 2017) that features distinctive linguistic and semiotic traits. This paper tackles a specific part of this discourse, namely “anglicisms”, which are nowadays widely used in the composition of tourist texts aimed at a general public. A corpus of average size was analysed, including 28 websites of German hotels that account for a total of 113849 occurrences. This corpus served, in the first place, the purpose of establishing an inventory of anglicisms and of their forms/formations and lemmata. English loan words were also counted and their relation to grammatical categories and thematic areas explored. An analysis of the use of anglicisms and their functional role within the websites follows. The results of the study suggest a frequent, though not excessive, use of anglicisms in hotels' online communication strategies. However, anglicisms are used as "technical terms" that play a "persuasive" role in all thematic fields. Moreover, anglicisms often appear in the form of hybrid compounds, such as Poolnacht or Firmenevent. These are are sometimes used creatively (Sehbar, Rundum-Verwöhn-Paket, Schokoladenbrunch, Wellnesstage) or formed by English loan words that have become quite productive in the German language (Wellness or Service). This strategy mirrors hotels' general philosophy of trying to couple traditional elements with a spirit of openness and fascination.