On the metadiscursive dimension of travel blog posts: a cross-linguistic analysis

This paper focuses on the analysis of interpersonal metadiscourse markers in English and Italian travel blog posts from a cross-linguistic perspective. Travel blogs pertain to what Dann (1996, p. 143) calls the “on-trip stage” of the tourist cycle: they are web-based travel diary-like accounts written and shared by travellers while they are still on the road and made freely available online (Cappelli, 2006; Dann & Liebman Parrinello, 2007). The assumption in this study is that the personal, ‘diary-like’ nature of travel blog posts makes them ideal territory for an analysis of interpersonal devices. The overall findings reveal that both Anglo-American and Italian travel bloggers place great emphasis on the manifestation of their identity, to establish and demonstrate their credibility for future travellers who will use information from what they consider credible blog posts thanks to their spontaneous writing. The results of the analysis highlight that comparable subjectivity characterises both travel blog corpora. In their subjective narrations, the domains of experience that both Anglo-American and Italian travellers most frequently focus upon include physical entities concerning the attractions visited. Details are attested in the texts as recurrently employed in evaluative expressions, frequently in conjunction with evaluative adjectives. Evaluation emerges as one of the key features of this web-based genre. Emphasis is also placed on readership. Readers – potential tourist/travellers – are very closely engaged by means of second-person pronouns that involve them in the discourse. The strategy of addressing them directly foregrounds the highly dialogic and reader-oriented nature of the travel blog posts analysed, whose main purpose is to involve their readership and create a rhetorical effect of closeness and involvement. These results may be a source for cross-cultural comparison of the language of online tourism advertising (e.g., travel agency websites, online travel companies) where suggestions and recommendations are likewise given.