“Geisha”, “Bunad”, “Gennever”: Exoticisms as Representatives of Geocultural Images in Tourist Discourse

This article deals with the issue of lexical explication of geocultural territory images in tourist discourse. As a linguistic tool for creating authentic images of spaces in “other cultures”, the author considers exotic lexemes functioning in the relatively new magazine “Russian Traveler” as a written alternative of tourist discourse. By continuous sampling of the issues for the period 2023–2024 a selection of 238 exotic words was made. These words were interpreted with the help of lexicographic and ethnographic sources as well as contextual analysis. In the process of systematising the linguistic material, 12 thematic groups of exoticisms with different frequency were identified: “Natural geographical objects”, “Food and drinks”, “Mythology”, “Plant world”, etc. These groups describe basic fragments of the ethnic world view. The use of various thematic groups of exoticisms-appellatives as well as simultaneous functioning of realonyms and mythonyms, among which there are theonyms, hydronyms, anthroponyms, demononyms, toponyms, and other semantic subgroups of the above lexicon, makes it possible to create geocultural images of territories at the verbal level of the analysed texts in conjunction with their physical and geographical, sociocultural, traditional and domestic, ethnic, and other components. In general, exotic vocabulary in tourist discourse actualises readers’ background knowledge about “other” countries, regions, towns and cities, explicates ritual meanings, supports ethnostereotypes, thus contributing to the promotion of a tourist product.