The representation of gastronomy in travel journalism across cultures: food and drink collocate pairs in English, Italian and Polish

Abstract

Using a corpus-driven approach, this paper will address aspects of formulaicity in the thematic area of food and drink in travel journalism, an under researched genre that has hitherto received scarce attention on the part of academics in general and linguists in particular. Three 1-million-word corpora, compiled by the authors for a previous study, were used to carry out the analysis. These were comprised of articles downloaded from the online versions of the Guardian, La Repubblica, and Gazeta, constituting representative and comparable samples of the genre of travel journalism in English, Italian and Polish. The texts were annotated for part-of-speech and lemma using TreeTagger. Collocate pairs were then extracted from the annotated data using tailor made Perl scripts. Subsequently a dispersion filter of presence in at least 20 different texts was applied.

The resulting collocate pairs were placed into various thematic areas from which those pertaining to the food and drink group were isolated for further analysis. Similarities and differences among the three languages were thus identified that point to differing ways in which eating and drinking, coupled with the tourism experience, are represented in the corresponding cultures.