Chapter 6. A corpus-based study of the discursive creation of a child consumer identity in official tourist information websites vs. opinion forums

Starting from an understanding of forums in terms of dialogic action games, as put forward by Weigand (see e.g. Weigand 2008, 2009, 2010), I look into the dialogic behaviour that unfolds in forums as an action game that conforms to a specific cultural unit. Largely based on previous research (Dolón 2012), where I studied the socio-semantic discursive construction of a consumer identity for the child as a social actor in official tourist information websites, this paper addresses the question of whether tourist opinion forums construct similar or differentiated identity profiles in comparison with official tourist websites. Behind this question lies the assumption that both genres often recreate identical rhetorical patterns where the discursive identity construction of the child as a consumer may be rarely questioned or contested, and therefore fail to express real consumer choices and, more specifically, identity traits. The study is corpusdriven, applying concordancing tools to allow for the scrutiny of a large specialized corpus, and relies on the methodological framework of Critical Discourse Analysis.