OXYMORAL

 

 

 

This paper published in the conference proceedings Tourism in Southern and Eastern Europe (“Shaping the Future: Digital Tourism and Sustainable Development”) describes the use of metaphors or, more broadly, elements of figurative language on the official website of the Cyril and Methodius Route. The website provides good material for exploring Dann’s hypothesis that the greater the cultural distance, the more metaphors are used in descriptions of tourist places. However, the research on the promotional materials of the Cyril and Methodius Route shows that the issue is more complex and ‘moral claim’ plays a major role in this area. The methodological approach adopted in this paper tends to avoid any subjectivity of the research by using artificial intelligence in determining the figurative index of each text on the Cyril and Methodius Route website, which is the text corpus. By using this corpus linguistics approach, quantitative data is collected and interpreted from a cultural perspective. A textual analysis reveals some shortcomings in the use of metaphors when addressing potential tourists, as a large number of these devices can be observed especially in the case of locations with considerable cultural significance in national mythology, which is not necessarily legitimate. As far as such sites are concerned, it is apparently considered desirable to give these attractions a ‘moral claim’ on the tourist, which is an example worthy of emulation for other cultural locations.

 

The article was funded by the EU NextGenerationEU through the Recovery and Resilience Plan for Slovakia under the project No. 09I03-03-V04-00670 Inverted Morality: Reversed Semantics in Old Church Slavic Moral Words (OXYMORAL).