Content area
Full Text
PRELIMINARY COMMUNICATION
Tourist attraction signage is an important element of a tourist destination's image and marketing. With growing competition, destinations, forced to develop distinctive images as to assist the tourists in their consumption of objects and services, create increasingly elaborate tourist attraction sign programs. Destinations enter contests for the most attractive, most original and even the kitschiest signage. Over the past two decades a tourist destination signage has become an object of intense research: the signs of a destination are counted, classified, explained, compared and evaluated. Underlying all this is a strong economic rationale, formulated within the destination management and the urban image construction perspectives. This paper elaborates the importance of a tourist attraction signage research from a linguistic perspective: primarily within the theoretical frame of sociolinguistics. It is the (socio) linguistic focus, so the paper contends, that can enable a better informed insight into the production and consumption of meanings through tourist attraction signage which other lines of research may leave comparatively unexplored and therefore undertheorised.
Keywords: tourist attraction signage, tourist destination's identity, centrality of language, sociolinguistics, discourse studies, metatheorising
INTRODUCTION
In a destination a tourist attraction signage is developed to perform numerous functions, the two most important being information and symbolic assertion (cf. Spolsky 2009:34). While in their informative capacity tourist attraction signs tell us about locations, directions and work hours, in their symbolic capacity they embody social relations, hierarchies and power. This ability of tourist attraction signage to contribute to the factual and symbolic construction of a tourist destination makes it an important factor of both the visitors' knowledge about the destination and the visitors' consumption of a destination. Whatever function may be dominant in a given case, it is the tourist attraction signage that moves tourist destination visitors to various locations to see and be seen in a shared process of consumption of a destination's attractions.
Aware of the importance of signage, tourist destinations create tourist attraction sign policies and programmes and form signage assessment committees. In the public eye are not just the most successful tourist attraction signage programmes or the most attractive individual signs, but also the failed signage programmes and the kitschiest signs.
As far as tourist destination signage research is concerned, it focuses mostly on...