Communicative functions of Online Travel Review titles: A pragmatic and linguistic investigation of destination and attraction OTR titles

The choice of tourism products usually requires time and effort, because of their nature and the huge amount of information available. In the online domain, the most credited source of information is word-of-mouth, which is mainly spread through social networks. The decision of which source to consult is often made relying on a first impression of search results, based on metadata. The paper considers Online Travel Review titles, and investigates their communicative functions adopting a pragmatic and linguistic approach. The results aim to describe characteristics of this type of metadata and provide indications for platform managers and designers.