This project aims at analysing what the verbal and visual patterns are in the representation of people in travel reviews about Moscow from TripAdvisor website.
Tourism is an integral part of the world economy and interaction between tourists and hosts is an important aspect of tourism. Tourism discourse plays a significant role in representing and shaping tourist-host interaction and online travel reviews have become a notable genre in tourism discourse. Salient representations produced by discourse can be identified by studying repeated patterns.
Despite explicit recognition that multimodality is an essential feature of tourism discourse and that visual resources can express other meanings than the visual ones, there is a lack of research analysing patterns in multiple modes. Moreover, most previous studies have considered only the representation of hosts.
To address this research gap, I look at the patterns in the verbal representation of hosts and tourists across the corpus of travel reviews, then similarly study the visual mode and, finally, compare the findings across the modes bringing in multimodality. While corpus techniques to analyse verbal representation are widely applied, few researchers have used a corpus-assisted methodology to analyse the visual representation, therefore, this approach needs further discussion and development.