English for international tourism: The promotion of Brescia and its province

The paper aims to describe the use of English in a context of international tourism. This is done through a corpus-based analysis of the website of Bresciatourism, a non-profit company that promotes Brescia and its territory both in Italy and abroad. The methodology adopted combines corpus linguistics methods with a socio-linguistic approach to the analysis of the verbal technique of keywords and keying (i.e. the notion of keyness at the lexical and semantic levels). The data presented provide some empirical findings to the discussion of how this verbal technique, variously discussed in semiotics (Dann 1996) as one of the strategies which realise the rhetoric of tourism, is used in a specific context of international tourism, and how the strategy correlates to either one or another of the three major theoretical perspectives on tourism discussed in semiotics - the perspective of play; perspective of strangerhood; perspective of authenticity. A brief conclusion is drawn before a short presentation of the potential interest of these findings for the ESP and ELF domains is put forward.