Keywords

• The criticism of tourism discourse as a type of specialised discourse rests mostly on the accessibility of its lexis
• which is said to lack many of the distinguishing features of specialised vocabulary. This paper discusses the results of a study of the linguistic strategies for the description of space and spatial relations in English and Italian guidebooks. The picture emerging from parallel and comparable corpus data as well as from elicitation tasks seems to raise some challenging questions about the widely-accepted claims regarding preferences in the encoding of spatial information in English and Italian. It also appears to support the hypothesis that highly accessible lexical items can be used in a functionally specialised way and therefore act as distinctive features of tourism discourse
• thereby contributing to its overall specialisation