Representing protection action in an ecotourism setting: a critical discourse analysis of visitors' books at a Greek reserve

Abstract

The implementation of a protection scheme is central to ecotourism. Drawing upon the theoretical framework of critical discourse analysis, the present study accounts for the way protection action is represented in visitors' books at a Greek reserve (Dadia forest). Specifically, proceeding to content analysis and considering a wide range of linguistic features (vocabulary, syntax, ergativity, aspect, and temporal and illocutionary indices), we study whether visitors, through the way they construct protection acts in their texts, display knowledge about and concern for environmental issues within an ecotourism context. The analysis suggests that visitors seem not to be particularly concerned or informed about the protection action undertaken for Dadia forest. With the green aspect of ecotourism rather neglected, this research empirically verifies that ecotourism conceals a consumerist essence under a green wrapping, functioning ideologically. Moreover, the present study offers qualitative insights into ecotourism research, disclosing how the ideological function of ecotourism is evident in the way visitors represent protection acts, since the version of protection action they construct diffuses their responsibilities for the environment.

Keywords:

• visitors' books
• ecotourism
• critical discourse analysis
• protection
• lexicalization
• causality scale
• agency
• aspect
• time encoding
• speech acts

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. Examples (extracts from the texts) were translated into English by the two authors. Italics were added to facilitate locating the relevant points each time.

2. All ergative terms concerning participants have an initial capital letter to be distinguished from the content (=common) use of social agents.

3. Declarative and commissive speech acts are not commented in terms of their representational effect because they did not appear in the data.

4. Context of situation and paralanguage (e.g., intonation, body movements) are combined with and/or are contrasted to linguistic indices for the determination of illocutionary force.

5. For this last remark we are indebted to one of the reviewers.