Representations of 'otherness' in travel reviews: a cross-cultural corpus-based study

The aim of this study is to investigate culture-bound perceptions of the holiday experience and their linguistic representations in TripAdvisor hotel reviews. The study was carried out on two comparable corpora of reviews of accommodation in Puglia writ-ten by English and Italian travellers. The corpus analysis is based on the methodology developed by Tognini-Bonelli (2001) for the identification of functional correspondences across languages, and on the combined quantitative and qualitative approach developed by Manca (2011). The findings obtained show that the perceptions of the holiday experience are culture-bound, vary between the two cultures involved, and imply linguistic representations determined by specific cultural orientations. Drawing on Manca’s methodology, corpus results will be discussed in terms of Cultural Orientations, following in particular Hall (1959/1990), Walker et al. (2003), Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner (1997), and Katan (2004)