The language of travel journalism in different cultures: a study of collocate pairs in English, Italian and Polish

Travel journalism has hitherto received scarce attention on the part of academics in general
and linguists in particular. Using a corpus-driven approach, this paper will focus on a key
aspect of formulaicity, collocate pairs and collocation, comparing and contrasting findings in
travel journalism in three different languages, English, Italian and Polish. In order to compile
three comparable corpora, one for each language, articles were downloaded from the online
versions of The Guardian, La Repubblica, and Gazeta. The texts were annotated for part-ofspeech
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 10
different texts was applied. The resulting collocate pairs were placed into thematic groups, the
largest of which were LOGISTICS and CULTURE+HISTORY. These categories were subjected
to further analysis, and it emerged that there were notable differences in their relative proportions
between the three sets of data. The results show how the collocate pairs in the three
languages point to differing constructions of destination images and tourism experiences in
these cultures, a finding relevant both to trainee travel journalists in the three languages, as
well as those translating into or from one of the three languages.