Lexical, Syntactic, and Stylistic Features of Texts on Travel and Pilgrimage in Tourism Discourse

The primary objective of this study is to identify the linguistic mechanisms through which tourism texts fulfill the functions of informing audiences, establishing credibility, and encouraging engagement in tourism-related activities. To achieve this aim, a working corpus consisting of 40 travel and pilgrimage texts in English and Uzbek was compiled. The corpus includes descriptions from official tourism websites, pilgrimage itineraries, audio-guide scripts, promotional brochures, and destination information sheets. The study further seeks to classify communicative functions into informative, persuasive, directive, and identificational categories, as well as to examine lexical markers, syntactic patterns, and stylistic strategies.
The research employs descriptive-analytical, comparative, and discourse-analytical methods, supplemented by corpus-based approaches. The findings indicate that tourism discourse possesses a hybrid structure. Travel texts are characterized by a predominance of convenience, experience, impression, and motivational components, whereas pilgrimage texts place greater emphasis on sacredness, historical memory, ethical norms, and spiritual proximity as their central semantic features. From a lexical perspective, evaluative adjectives, culture-specific realia, and cultural and sacred units occur frequently, while simple sentences, imperative forms, bullet-point structures, and headline-like constructions are widely employed. At the stylistic level, epithets, metaphors, inclusive forms of address, cautious modality, and positive evaluation contribute significantly to audience engagement and persuasive impact.
The analysis also demonstrates that travel texts are more strongly associated with promotional and service-oriented semantics, while pilgrimage texts exhibit a more stable presence of axiological and ethical markers. These findings suggest that an effective tourism text functions not merely as a medium of information transmission but as a multilayered discursive construct that shapes the recipient’s perceptions, influences the acceptance of values, and guides decision-making processes.
Accordingly, the results of this study may serve as a methodological foundation for tourism content creation, pilgrimage communication, translation, editing practices, and multilingual content strategy development