Explorıng the Onlıne Advertısıng of the Maltese Archıpelago’s Herıtage through Ecostylıstıcs

Applying the theoretical and methodological paradigm of ecostylistics to analyse the sections “What to See & Do”, "Places”, “About Malta”, and “Gozo and Comino” of the official tourist portal of the Maltese archipelago, the aim of the contribution is to identify what linguistic and textual strategies are used, within a more general framework of tourism discourse, to represent Malta a) as a site for heritage tourism (Dallen and Boyd 2003; Park 2014), and b) as “truly Mediterranean”. More specifically, an ecostylistic analysis of one written text presented in the section “What to See & Do” will be carried out, in order to distinguish those linguistic features which form part of the language of tourism from those stylistic features of Malta’s official tourism website that, far from being deployed to describe and provide information about spaces, places and landscapes, are utilised as implicit persuasive means (Östman 2005) to promote the archipelago as a tourist destination worth visiting for its history, heritage, culture and Mediterranean appeal. In addition, a brief examination of the keywords ‘Mediterranean’ and ‘history’, ‘heritage’, ‘culture’ in the pages crosslinked to the text analysed will be offered, in order to provide further co-textual support to the findings of the ecostylistic analysis.