Building information trust and shaping intention to visit Saudi Arabia: A pragmatic discourse analysis of stance, evidentiality, and persuasion in firm- and consumer-generated digital tourism content
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Abstract
Prospective tourists encounter destinations through language before they experience them through travel. Company websites, visitor reviews, and social media exchanges offer competing accounts of what a journey might involve, yet their influence cannot be explained adequately by identifying who posted them. The wording of a claim also matters: writers express certainty, supply evidence, acknowledge restrictions, and position readers as particular kinds of visitors. This conceptual article connects research on electronic word of mouth and information adoption with linguistic accounts of stance, evaluation, and pragmatic inference. It develops a framework for examining how firm- and consumer-generated English-language content about Saudi Arabia may support information trust and visit intention. The central argument is that readers assess both a message's evidential basis and its relevance to their own circumstances, within expectations shaped by authorship and commercial purpose. Linguistic credibility remains distinguishable from factual accuracy, while trusting information remains distinguishable from deciding to travel. Constructed examples demonstrate the proposed analytical categories without being presented as collected tourism data. A prospective research design combines corpus comparison, contextual reading, and reader experiments to investigate the framework. The article contributes an explicit account of language between content production and tourist decision-making, while identifying the conditions under which persuasive discourse can inform, disappoint, or mislead.
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