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    302 Melina Magdalena and Peter Miihthdusler Mihihausler, Peter 1983 Talking about environmental issues. Language and Communica ion 3 (1): 71-81. Miihihdusler, Peter 2003 Language of Environment. Environment of Language. London: Battlebridge Publications. Myers, Norman 1999 The Gaia Atlas of Future Worlds. London: Robertson McCarta Limited, Myerson, George, and Yvonne Rydin 1996 The Language of Environment. A New Rhetoric. London: UCL Press. Partridge, Brie 1961 Smaller Slang Dictionary. London: Routledge & Kegan. [second edition, 1964] Steiner, Rudolf 1993 ial Foundations for the Renewal of Agriculture. Kimber ton, PA: Biodynamic Farming and Gardening Ass. USA. |, Norman The Effluent Society. London: Methuen & Co. ionary of New Words. A Popular Guide to Press. Knowledge. Canberra: Centre for Re- I Studies, Zipf, George Kingsley 1949 Human Behaviour and the Principle of Least Effort. Cambridge, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co. The phraseology of tourism: A central lexical field and its cultural construction Andrea Gerbig and Angela Shek 1, Introduction ture have long been discussed from various angles. Corpus lingu has brought a new, empi schemata, Such cog- that can be documented schemata with their attendant pragmatic evaluation. ly based, qualitative approach, showing patterns and Tegularities in language use that would otherwise, without the help of cor- pus methods, hardly be perceptible and which therefore opens new views on cultural concepts and conventions Mol a cultural keyword these days, just as important as gt ravel’, or ‘holiday’ are a subst is not least a question of status. Our and leisure, accompanied by common expectat to spend one’s free time, A network of related language use represents and at the same time construes the topic in our culture. These linguistic Tepresentations are related with our views on good and bad holidays, fascinating or boring travel, ecological or detrimental tourism and, ac- cordingly, how we evaluate people and institutions involved in one or the investigate collocational patterns around the major keywords and TRAVEL! and in particular those around the phrase ‘package holiday in the British data. As database, we will use the Lancaster- Oslo-Bergen (LOB) corpus (1960s) ‘burg-version, plus the internet (KWIC-Finder). This will cover the diachronic develop- ‘ment of approximately 40 years from the 1960s to today. 304 Andrea Gerbig and Angela Shek 2. Tourism: A very brief background ing to spas in their own country as thern Europe became kni ). The people for education and pleasure were according wrote down their experiences and adventures, in some other. The most famous of these (in Europe) are probably Goethe's deserip- tions of his Italy travels in 1786- nature, sprinkled with the occasional “cul- Sun- and sea-bathing became famous, just as skiing and cated life-style. The tourism industry as we know it today is the third largest industry in the world. It emerged in the nineteenth century, notably under the influence Cook, and has been growing rapidly since the 1930s, after the Great Depression in America and Europe. A ne advent of jet travel in 1952. This was when mass national enterprise. The decline in agricultural employment and loss of in- dustrial jobs forced regions and cities to seek new sources of business to sur- 's and regions intensively compete for tourist money. They often ty of a region. Serious criticism of mass tourism emerged in the 1960s in economic and environmental studies. The tourist carrying capacity of regions was investi- gated in ecological terms as well as with regard to possible mul 4s of tourist money, which were often counteracted by local Today, discussions of sustainable tourism or eco-tourism are stron; into manageable channels and furthei ve natural areas, Socio- logical and tradi- ti whose modernity naive tourist notions of experiencing “authentic” lives and rites of “natives The phraseology of tourism 30S 3. Initial example the col and tourists will be discussed, The con- texts in which these two words occur in the LOB corpus display several evaluative meanings (in order of frequency): interest ly weary of tourists, who, however, have to be ons are historical and cultural sights, — Crime against tourists is still petty In the FLOB corpus, the most frequent sets of collocates concem the fol- lowing areas: — Mass tourism has established itself. There are numerous descriptions of tourists appearing in too large numbers . — Crime against tourists is increasing, in numbers as in severi — Tourists are identified as a major economic factor. Accordingly, infra structures are built and extended. — Issues of combining tourist interests and ecological protection are in- creasingly discussed. In the BNC, the most prominent collocates are the following: — Negative eval out for tourists to visit and observe. In these contexts, tourists are often 308 Andrea Gerbig and Angela Shek represented as stupid enough not to perceive differences in quality and authenticity. — Danger for tourists is mentioned regularly, with respect to both acci- dents and crime, Although there is a diachror ing around ‘ourist/s, as the three different corpora show, several basic as- sumptions stay relatively similar over the years. It is obvious from all three data sources that tourist money is needed. The single tourist’s behaviour as such is mentioned ast towards a potentially interesting foreigner, occasionally le in LOB, gives way over the years (as documented in FLOB and BNC) to a sedate weariness over the necessity to cater for and entertain Frequently, the inal sights they themselves wi dn’t classify as a si stock exchange, a fu describes the absurdity of the London sewage sys- tem being marketed as a tourist attraction at the end of the 19th century. Individual attempts at ignoring ‘leaving the beaten tracks” do not occur in the contexts of rourisi/s, but rather with TRAVEL. about the role of tourists in European / British culture. This is most casily following four sets of metaphorical representations around the — invade, pervade, destroy, presst 1g, SWELL (masses of tou The phraseology of tourism 307 as masses of animals, warriors or natural forces out of control relates to ions to be avoided. its presumed attendant conceptual schemas based on a shared cultural background. Texts need to be analysed as ex- pressions of culture where cultural experience is language use. A useful theoretical approach cept of discursi igency. Discourse, which is public and frequent, can construe new It construes and defines people’s knowledge and regulates communi- cation about the respective topies. A discursive formation contains every- the cultural community. Discursive formations are always intertextual in that elements, e.g. particular keywords in their collocations and phrases, fulfil functions in various texts and discourses. People construe cance through shared (lingui isin conventional- ised way: Searle's (1995) argument, which is discussing how institutional ural) facts always presuppose a semi- otic system, Only if we can communicate about, agree on and integrate some experience into our discourse and e, can we accept status of items legal consequences, just because each ty has agreed on it to be so, largely on the basis of a net of linguistic represent o tourism, a rather abstract, though linguistically transi buying services, maybe even branch is regulated by (a semio' Halliday’s (1978) concept of ship between this cu Against the background of the community and st, goes further in the reciprocal individual-cognitive aspect. shared language use, the and linguistic competence, such as, out, and means of communicating about, tourism. The indi- the boundaries of the language norm’, then language system where continual use, with jiachronic perspective (cf. Halliday 1992 and 1993). Significant parts of this meaning-making process are of course construed by, and hence can be traced in, discourse. The concept of ‘representation’ serves as the uniting element between individual and cultural experience and cognition on the one hand and lin- encoding on the other hand. Representation is discussed in different 28) refers to it as “the link between concepts and us to refer to either the is the production of meaning through they construe Although this might be a contested view of culture, it can be revealing to investigate pervasive everyday dis- course that shapes ~ and is shaped by ~ the ordinary way a culture and its individual participants function. ns between language, cognition (knowledge) and stances of language use in t obvious to the individual language user. Representative cor- pora are meant to cover large portions of a wide range of language use. Such corpora are repositories of a multiplicity of uses, providing a view on and regularity of the system. In terms of a frequency distri- bution, we can see cultural routines and conventions emerging from the itterances. A large, balanced corpus therefore provides concrete te such common, conventional behaviour that, given its, stretching, ‘over more than one word) are important linguistic representations of such conceptual and cultural schemata. We take schemata here as the connecting and analysable elements be- tween the linguistic and cognitive / psychological levels, which are inter~ woven with the cultural frame. Large parts of our everyday life are based The phraseology of tourism 309 on shared (interpretative) schemata, where sch term for a set of related concepts (frame / seri is used as an umbrella hema), describing cu turally shared knowledge about situations, events or structures. This in- 5. Semantic schemata ‘Semantic schemata are patterns in language use of hat word units and gramma lar. They share a pragi mantic prosodies of (2000: 37) det wes of the node word. Hunston the words and structures which are regularly associated with the word and which contribute to its meaning . ifa combination of words occurs relatively frequently, ... and if there is a clear meaning associated with it”. ‘Two aspects are important he that is the co-sel in detai fe language use cons constructed phrases, which are chosen as ries of semantically related sets of collocates of the investigated node words. These sets each show a shared evaluation of the main concept un- derlying the phrases around the node. If, ing a nuisance”, the words in today’s language use. The second aspect concems the more fixed end of the continuum of collocational stability. The terminology around such phraseological phe- nomena is manifold and differently used by different athors', We will fo- 310 Andrea Gerbig and Angela Shek cus here in a less form (Sinclair 1996). The term word boundaries, that are habi meaning in a community of language users is preferred in Sincl wves enough descri (ELU) ion units across lised phrases. Fillmore (1997) points out the relevance of such phraseological phe- tural background’. According to him, such a unifying funetion a socio- , because people can rely on a common stock of con- cepts and references. This inn ta substantial part of our experience is categorized by, and organized into, cognitive schemata, They, in turn, locates of a node. A discourse prosody can be understood as the pragmatic motivation for choosing the particular ELU in the first place’. In its pragmatic function, this evaluative element can be compared force of speech acts. Therefore, it plays an important the communicative competence of the members of a society, Cognitive schemata (i.e. concepts about the structure of culturally im- portant situations and events), together with the inferences that are drawn from communication, plus the habitual language use in semantic schemata which encode pragmatic evaluation, open ways of empirically documenting culturally shared structures of meaning. 6. TRAVEL ‘The following is an investigation o' fore probably also concepts of tion to general socio-cultural changes. ‘As the distribution of the lemma TRAVEL in the different corpora The pha Table 1. Frequency of occurrence of the lemma TRAVEL LOB total 14 times in 1,000 words is obvious that people travel further because they can or country to a different This goes along with technol travelling by car and then by air. 2. Frequent examples of destinations and means of transport collocating with TRAVEL Corpus LOB FLOB Denmark, London, France, Spain, Hamburg, Peking, Hong Kong, Ecuador, New World BNC The difference between these two groups of people will be elari In the LOB corpus, many contexts of the lemma TRAVEL still depict travelling as something spe- ig described as educated, often wealthy’, iz can be done, Occasion: lay-makers are mentioned, who, for exampl quent. In the FLOB corpus, the majority of contexts, however, refer to tra ther, occasionally in a meta- through space or matter. ing in their free time ascribe them a ese travellers are depicted as searching Jing just as movement from one place to horical sense, such as light or particl concordances around people trav. certain seriousness. Very often, 312 Andrea Gerbig and Angela Shek for some mind-broadening enlightenment, scholarly knowledge or cultural experience, In the BNC, there is a mixture of collocations; on the one hand, travelling merely a necessary movement due to one’s job or st kind. Commuters and frequent tra and related incon- veniences, Table 3 gives an overview of the concordance lines (very frequent! dressed as “travellers” or “people” i people travelling, if this is specified in the actors are just anonymously ad- ‘As the table shows, the people who travel become more common or ordinary over the years. While travelling used to be expensive and time-consumi ly reserved for wealthy people, for those who c whose costs of travel why so many occurrences in LOB named travellers, Tra days, everyone can travel, or maybe even has to travel on a regular basis. This increasing trend, in tum, might account for the fact that in the later data, travellers are mainly referred to as groups or masses, and hardly any~ more as individual people. Table 3. People who travel, according to LOB, FLOB and BNC. Corpus ‘Travellers LOB — Member of Parliament, Colonial Secretary, President, Royal Family. (people addressed anonymously, not indi The phraseology of tourism 313 7. Package holiday “The package holiday is particularly appropriate to the personality traits of accompanying the phrase package holiday in the BNC can docum portant aspects of socio-cultural structure, stratification, conventions and preoccupations. The most frequent types of representation concern five ‘main semantic fields: 1. Package holidays are an important economic factor and a highly com- petitive market sector which concems the operators on the one hand, and the customers on the other hand. This is obvious in frequent co- (many in ive expressions ms to prices and purchasing a package evond (the reach of) (someone's) pocket’, ing @ deal, bargain>. 2. Package holidays are a kind of ready-made product for Everything is taken care of; no personal planning effort and respor is needed. One si complete prod- according to persor ies. They are convenient and well structured. The three main patterns here concer — Events and a ies that are declared touristic highlights, such as a ing tigers (etc), an eclipse of — Specifically prepared destinations and forms of holidays, such as and , — Relaxation and personal wé . on the resorts have to offer are of paramount ini-bus, meals, fare reduction, concession>. Ithough the product comes in different categories of price and com- fort, there are similar stereotypes about the groups of consumers who buy package holidays. Somehow, it seems to be of superior value to plan our holidays ourselves. In doing so, one immediately reverts to the expression TRAVEL and collocations of . 5. The package holiday market, as a branch of the tourism industry, is a highly regulated market, with its legal framework firmly institutional- ised in contemporary western culture: . This is also visible in the naming practice for the travel options that such as: . The fear of terrorist attacks has spread dramatically in the last few years. A search in up-to-date internet data (KWIC-Finder) documents an almost exploding frequency after September 11, 2001, with temporarily detrimental effects ‘on the tourism industry. It is important to realize that these are the common and agreed-on ways of representing the topic of a package holiday. Although we do have the possibility to frame the events differently, the majority of lan- guage users chose the above documented expressions that, therefore, be- came visible as high frequeney occurrences in the concordance data. We probably have not very widely differing expectations about a <2 night weekend package> or a <4 day beach package are perpetuated by the respective, shared discourse in the speech com- munity. We see this in stereotypes coming to the fore: Majorca and Costa del Sol ate still the most frequently bought destinations for European (Brit- ish) package holiday travellers. These are almost the “default” destinations for the stereotypical 14-day beach package holiday. A cert - tached to this choice. Collocates indicate that it is predominately a lower s choice. A few concordance lines, exemplifying other clichéd — = . While the beach package is obviously restricted in its offers mostly to beach and water sports, the occasional excursion and the obligatory i weekend package is usually marked by relatively high activity levels of holiday-makers. Some of the more popular pastimes seem to be 1g, walking, climbing While immersed in these activities, people expect the following experience: — ‘They want to stay in fa s such as: — . s of thematically specified weekend packages cater for the most = . 316 Andrea Gerbig and Angela Shek ‘onal patterns strong higher-income clientele, Com- package holidays, even if they seem to be adventurous and maybe even strenuous, are a kind of convenience product, to be con sumed in a ready-made, planned and organised way. This concept of a package holiday goes along with a trend in society to buy easy. is goes as far as, pouring ready-made cake dough from a plastic pack into a baking mould to put it into the oven. You can retain the satisfaction of a freshly baked cake out of your own oven, without the hassle of preparing anything yourself. large parts of the do-it-yourself market are saturated with pre~ int time schedule of the consumers, wemselves, ‘An analysis of the related key-expression ready-made shows that its frequencies are not significantly different in LOB, FLOB and BNC. Out of the total occurrences, those referring to convenience products such as food, clothing and furniture related elements, however, illustrate resting differences in the representation of the concept. In LOB, these ly a third of all occurrences and they are framed in a very al way, preferring hand-made products. While in FLOB, the percent- similar to LOB, the representations, in contrast, are positive, praising the convenience of ready-made products for con- sumers. In the BNC, the relevant percentage of ready-made of the total occurrences. We find a mixture of evaluati the amount of ready-made products has risen so steadi want and need them. Their quality is regularly praised whi ciency is presupposed and therefore hardly explicitly mentioned. Without seems hardly yy live. However, an astonis! igh proportion of the concordance lines around the node indicate more or less severe criticism directed towards ready-made prod- ucts and the accompanying life style. In the field of nutrition, issues of health and pleasure in consuming fresh, hand/home-made products are dis ‘course prosody visi al evaluations, emphas- ising the intrinsic value perceived in products which are not pre-processed. The phraseology of tourism 317 In particular in the field of food, a strong aspect of quality and sophisti- cation is implied, coupled with snobbish ridiculing of convenience food ‘consumers, Coming back to package holidays as one among the vast array of con- venience products, they are described as a form of “New Tourism”. This term indicates a variety of tourisms that emerge from what is referred to as the mainstream or conventional mass tourism. It closely relates to new types of consumers (the so called new middle class), and post-Fordism, a new form. of economic organisation or mass production and consumption (Rojek and. Urry 1997) Practices of mass consumption conceming travel products are among the major cultural shifts in contemporary society.’ Package holidays repre- sent a change of conver is, consumption of services (cf. made”) rather than goods, across a new horizon o! Products are produced created to serve consumer needs, offering differe Parallel to the unbroken trend of cheap and good-value package holi- days at not too far away beaches is, since the 1970s, a heightened interest is visible going to an opera in Rome, rafting in Canada, fasting and walking in Tusce highly organised and standardised. Everybody can find their conven- ient product (even sex-holidays in Thailand, cf. Houellebecq 2003). How- typed and put into categories, even if = (BNC). These days, our average working hours are considerably fewer than in the early 1960s. We work less on a ly and weekly basis and have more holidays at our disposal. There is a weird mixture of discourse about bore- 318. Andrea Gerbig and Angela Shek dom and lack of excitement on the one hand and stress and burnout syn- dromes on the other hand, Package holidays cater for both moods ~ recrea- tion and adventure. People can

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