Tourism in a Semantic Mirror: Retheorizing Tourism from the Linguistic Turn

Abstract

Although scholars have sought to theorize tourism from important philosophical turns (e.g., epistemological/antirational/postmodern/practice), one influential turn (viz. linguistic) has not received much attention. This study attempts to fill this gap by retheorizing tourism from the linguistic turn. We introduced major theories of meaning (a core part of the linguistic turn) from the philosophy literature, on the basis of which we constructed a new semantic space of “tourism” where multiple semantic dimensions (defined by particular types of meaning theories) coexist and possess different semantic veins (determined by a subtheory of meaning) consisting of numerous semantic dots (i.e., actual understandings of tourism). This prescriptive space captures the image of tourism in a semantic mirror, encompassing tourism ontologies in a semantic/linguistic realm. This space also offers solutions to four problems in prior tourism theorization. By innovatively linking tourism and philosophy of language, this study has expanded the options in addressing the question “What is tourism?”