The Language of Ecotourism: An Ecolinguistic Approach

Ecotourism is a form of sustainable tourism that involves visiting natural areas with the aim of learning about and engaging with the more-than-human world. It is commonly seen as a way to combine tourism with environmentalism, and as such, it has the potential to promote ecological consciousness. However, ecotourism is also a complex and contested domain, and is often caught between the competing demands of economy and ecology. This doctoral dissertation explores the language of ecotourism from an ecolinguistic perspective, dealing with how discursive patterns affect the way humans think of and act towards the biological ecosystems that support life on earth. Specifically, the study focusses on the representation of the natural world in ecotourism discourse, as well as the relationship among operators, ecotourists, local communities, and more-than-human entities. A specialised corpus of online promotional materials (104,483 tokens), encompassing the websites of ecotourism companies and articles from travel magazines, is accordingly built and investigated. The analysis adopts both quantitative and qualitative approaches, combining a variety of methods that include corpus linguistics, critical discourse analysis, and frame semantics. In particular, it develops a systematic procedure for the identification of framings – i.e., recurrent conceptualisations – of the natural world which is based on the corpus-assisted retrieval of meaningful lexical items and the use of the FrameNet (https://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu/) database. The findings of the dissertation suggest that the language of ecotourism hybridises features of tourism and environmentalism discourse, and is used to promote a positive view of ecotourism and legitimise ecotourism activity at large. Nonetheless, the analysis also confirms the inherent ambivalence of ecotourism: its texts routinely describe ecosystems and their beings in terms of inert objects, they reduce human/non-human engagement to aesthetic appreciation of landscapes, and perpetuate harmful stereotypes about natural areas and the people who inhabit them. The work concludes by discussing the implications of its results for the practice of ecotourism. It argues that ecotourism practitioners need to be more aware of the ways in which language can be used to foster ecological commitment. Furthermore, it suggests that while the economy/ecology opposition of ecotourism may not be suppressed, future ecotourism communication and activity should rely on more positive framings that highlight the agency and complexity of the more-than-human world. Overall, this dissertation provides a valuable contribution to the field of ecolinguistics, and it is of interest to scholars of ecolinguistics, tourism studies, and environmental studies.