Lingua-cultural Peculiarities of Tourism Discourse and the Perspective of its Teaching

Abstract

The article deals with the problem of lingua-cultural peculiarities of tourism discourse, contrastive analysis of English and Georgian tourism-related vocabulary and terminology, and outlook of teaching tourism discourse to students or people who are interested in the field of tourism. Tourism discourse is an independent type of discourse that has a specific addressee and it refers to communication among people who do not belong to a specific social or cultural group or language community. Therefore, our main focus will be addressed to reveal language peculiarities of English and Georgian tourism discourse to make the teaching process easier for any group of people who are interested in understanding the specific terms and expressions used in the texts. Revealing lingua-cultural differences and similarities between the chosen English and Georgian texts contributes to a better understanding of various cultures and traditions. Thus, the paper aims to research the vocabulary and terminology of the tourism discourse and to select the appropriate terminology for teaching tourism-related texts considering their lingua-cultural peculiarities.

The research based on contrastive analysis of English and Georgian tourism-related texts shows that in professional and academic tourism discourses certain terms and special vocabulary are observed, in public tourism discourse - evaluative vocabulary and emotional connotations prevail. Lingua-cultural analysis of the tourism-related English and Georgian texts showed that they are characterized by an abundance of borrowed words and lacunas, although the use of idioms is rare. The conclusions drawn in the paper contribute to the further research of tourism texts. In addition, it should be noted that the work is interdisciplinary, and it will be useful not only for specialists working in the tourism industry but for philologists and teachers teaching English to students qualifying in tourism.