A multimodal and cross-cultural analysis of farmhouse holidays websites. A comparison between Italy, Germany and Austria

This project aims to analyse the language of tourism as a specialized discourse as well as to investigate the way cultural orientations affect tourists’ choices in the before-travelling stage. To this end, a multimodal approach has been applied to the promotion strategies implemented on websites of farmhouses in Italy, Germany and Austria. Websites as hybrid media (Antelmi 2007, p. 218) are particularly worth investigating due to their multimodal nature. Not only words, but also nonverbal elements play a crucial role in producing meaning and are here thereby taken as useful tool to decode culture. A corpus-based investigation of the texts from the websites will then integrate the data of the multimodal analysis, in order to make assumptions about the persuasive strategies within the two cultures and their linguistic realisations. Findings have been interpreted through the framework of ‘Cultural Communication Grammar’ (Manca 2016b), which provides a classification of the ways cultures express different strings of meaning in communication and relies on other theories provided by intercultural studies (Hofstede 2001; Hall 1982, 1983). Early results already reveal significant differences between the cultural systems involved and also in reference to how verbal and nonverbal language are at work in the promotion of farmhouse holidays in the countries involved.