From Academia to Tourism: Specialized Discourse in Architecture and its Adaptation to Tourism Contexts

Abstract

This article compares how architectural heritage is described in specialised publications and Spanish tourist guides. It aim to examine how specialized architectural discourse is adapted for tourist contexts, particularly in texts addressed to non-expert readers. To this end, a corpus of sixteen works with varying degrees of specialisation was compiled. All texts relate to the history of architecture and are classified into four thematic areas. The comparison is conducted at two levels of analysis: the macrostructural level, which concerns the organisation of the work’s central ideas, and the sequential level, which examines the relative prominence of architectural description in relation to other textual sequences, such as expository and narrative ones. The study concludes that significant changes occur at both levels of analysis, shaped by the communicative function, subject matter, and textual genre.