Communicating the Image of Venice: the Use Of Discourse Markers in Websites And Digital Travel Guidebooks in English

Authors

  • Daniela Cesiri

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.13136/2281-4582/2017.i10.481

Abstract

The study investigates a corpus of websites and digital travel guidebooks–collected in a corpus–that promotethe city of Venice using English as alingua francato convey the promotional message. The study examines acorpus of texts already used in three previous contributions to conduct a more detailed analysis of the stylisticfeatures present in the digital texts. The aim is to understand how the promotional message is conveyed to avaried audience who has different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. In particular, it is here investigated theuse of discourse markers (DMs), and their semantic and pragmatic relationships with respect to the context ofoccurrence. To do so, Bruce Fraser’s definition and classification of DMs will be used to analyse the corpus .Results show that the DMs investigated share the common pragmatic function of ‘topic orientation markers’,i.e., they signal an aspect of the organization of the ongoing discourse. Semantically, however, they havedifferent–but very specific–relationships with the surrounding segments of discourse. More specifically, theauthors of the texts preferably use DMs to signal that a warning, a reminder, or some advice, will follow in thenext segment

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Published

2017-12-01

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Articles: Special Section