INTRODUCTION

In the conceptual environment moulded by the trends of globalization with an ever deeper penetration of digital technologies into the sphere of communication, tourist texts represent a genre that still offers the possibility of analysing and comparing the preferences guiding the lexical patterns that are indigenous to the cultures at hand – especially if local providers are targeted as the text producer. Unlike the language of business, technology and hard science that is either English itself with its various Englishes used by non-native speakers (cf. Trakulkasemuk and Pingkarawat 2010; Seidlhofer 2010) or, if a different language is concerned, it is highly penetrated by internationalisms, the language employed to promote recreation in a certain destination is often driven by the local images of what is perceived as the sought-after values – especially if not managed by worldwide operators in the business of tourism. It is therefore assumed that by studying corpora of tourist texts produced by local providers in Great Britain and Slovakia, individual cultural preferences behind the lexical choices made can be distilled and compared, thus gaining insights into the cultures studied.

THE GENRE OF TOURIST TEXTS

From the point of view of function, the role of tourist texts is both to inform and to persuade the target reader, which means they can be classified as an instance of what Bhatia (1993: 45–75) calls “promotional genres.” One of the most important stylistic features thus consists in foregrounding the communicative purpose of persuading, attracting, motivating and influencing potential customers (cf. Torresi 2010). If the wider socio-economic context is considered, advertising is a phenomenon inseparable from the free-market economy – an economic model that has been imported to Eastern Europe after the collapse of the communist bloc in 1989 from Western Europe and the United States. While in the latter two regions the genre has undergone more than a hundred years of intense development, the post-communist countries have witnessed a major expansion of advertising only in the last few decades. It could thus be claimed that the genre is still in search of its proper identity in the given context.