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Abstract
Although destination image has long been studied, little is known about how it is linguistically constructed across genres of English-language tourism discourse. This comparative corpus-based study examines three small specialized corpora for Takarazuka City, Japan: an Official Tourism Website Corpus (OTWC; 8,908 tokens), a User-Generated Tourism Corpus of online reviews (UGTC; 6,054 tokens), and a Travel Journalism Corpus from Time’s World’s Greatest Places 2025 (TJC; 25,130 tokens), the last serving as a destination-general benchmark. Using frequency- and dispersion-based word lists, semantic categorization informed by the cognitive-affective model, 4-gram clusters, and log-likelihood keyness with effect sizes in AntConc 4.2.0, the study shows that the OTWC projects an institutional image centered on cultural heritage and the Takarazuka Revue; the UGTC constructs a perceived image through first-person reference, evaluative adjectives, and practical concerns such as accommodation and access; and the TJC constructs an editorially mediated image through novelty markers and quoted voices introduced by says. The comparison reveals a mismatch between projected and perceived images, especially the greater salience of manga in reviews and performing arts on the official website. It demonstrates how small comparative corpora link genre-specific lexical choices to destination image and offers implications for English-language destination
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