Multimodal corpus analysis of digital tourism narratives: A data-driven approach based on Systemic Functional Linguistics and social semiotics

This dissertation seeks to contribute to the field of tourism discourse and empirical research on multimodality by providing insights into the multisemiotic, promotional strategies of three popular English-speaking tourism boards on their Instagram accounts and company websites. It investigates specifically how discourse specialists systematically combine linguistic resources with photography to design particular representations of the travel experience and convey positive attitudes towards holiday destinations. The study offers a multidisciplinary review that explores the connections between Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), semiotics and media studies, multimodality and sociology of tourism to gain an understanding of the current means of expression and legitimation of individuals’ socio-economic needs and desires in contemporary, postmodern society (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006; Halliday and Matthiessen 2014; Dann 1996; Berger 1972; Barthes 1977). The core section of the dissertation consists in a multimodal investigation into three tourism boards' communication strategies through quantitative and qualitative methods. The objectives of this study were achieved by developing a SFL framework that analyzed and compared linguistic and visual choices in each digital channel under investigation. To this aim, multimodal data were collected from the Instagram accounts and websites of Tourism Ireland, Destination Canada, and Tourism Western Australia. The work includes the systematic, manual annotation of multimodal corpora through a data- driven, tagging system based on the Grammar of Visual Design and Transitivity and Appraisal systems (Pflaeging et al. 2021; Martin and White 2005; Thompson 2008). The quantification of multisemiotic strategies, furthermore, allowed for a statistical measurement of their frequency and significant variance across digital channels. The methodology included also inter-coder reliability measures in R. The overall analysis has helped to define new discursive trends that assign particular roles to prospective tourists and praise specific aspects of the travel destination depending on audiences’ social needs and the specific medium’s communicative aim in the marketing funnel of persuasion (Manca 2016). In this sense, this study unveils the emergence of an Instagram, image-centric genre of tourism discourse (Bateman 2014a) that focuses on the stimulation of imagination and irrational response through less informative but highly evocative, evaluative orchestrations (Stöckl et al. 2020). The latter specifically play on postmodern individuals’ inner desire for control and supposedly deliberate choice to engage emotively with the extra-ordinary (Urry and Larsen 2011). The results of this study may also lead to an informed understanding as well as an awareness of how ideologies are perpetuated today and may be resisted. Consequently, this may support individuals in their attempts to challenge the ‘legitimacy’ of established views, opinions, and passive acceptance of them, and contribute to the construction of ‘counternarratives’ (Ahearn 2001; Plant 1992).