This document discusses findings from research on the use of adjectives in tourism English texts from websites. It identifies the frequent use of positive adjectives to highlight attractive features. Adjectives are important in genres like reviews, advertisements and novels to describe people and places. The methodology involved producing a frequency list of adjectives from a hotel website corpus and analyzing collocations. Key findings included common adjectives and their semantic categories, use of superlatives and intensifiers, and frequent adjective-noun pairs. The document recommends corpus tasks for students to analyze adjective use in different tourism texts.

1. Michelle Li
2017

2.  Adjectives in tourism English on the web
 Findings from the research
 Findings from the corpus
 Collocation
 Group tasks

3.  Huang (2015)
◦ The most conspicuous common lexical feature of
the corpus (BTI) is the frequent use of active,
favorable adjectives, which highlights the positive
features of the places described and the services
offered.

4.  modifying, modulating or elaborating the meaning of
nouns, play a relevant role in discourse.
 Central in various genres:
◦ the critical review (a charming book, a fascinating read, a
questionable classification);
◦ the back-cover blurb (an invaluable textbook, a breath-
taking drama, memorable characters);
◦ the advertisement, where adjectives like new, special, fine,
best, original frequently occur;
◦ the novel, in the description of people and places, e.g. the
opening paragraph of R.L. Stevenson’s The Strange Case of
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde which portrays a Victorian lawyer
employing many adjectives (cold, scanty, lean, long, dusty,
etc.).
quoted from Pierini (2009)

5.  Lehrer (1975) : the discourse of wine
 Carter (1998) : the discourse of cooking
 Coxhead (2003): a corpus of written
Academic English
from Pierini (2009)

6.  a global enterprise that has captured the
relevance of the Web as a new mass medium
for contacting potential receivers all over the
world and promoting tourist products both in
domestic and international markets.
quoted from Pierini (2009)

7.  The data are extracted from a small
specialised corpus compiled by downloading
the pages of British hotel Web sites.

8.  a multi-billion repository of documents,
offering an enormous amount of empirical
data for linguistic research that are fresh,
authentic and representative, since any
domain, discourse type, content area or
textual genre are present.
quoted from Pierini (2009)

9.  The methodology adopted consists of two
steps:
◦ first, a frequency wordlist of the adjectives
occurring in the corpus is produced;
◦ then, some of the most frequent adjectives are
analysed in concordances to highlight relevant
features of accommodation discourse and to
discover collocations.

10.  frequency wordlist of the adjectives occurring
at least fifty times in the Hotel Corpus.
 Table 1 on p.99

11.  Exploring the semantics of adjectives
 Table 2 on p.104

12.  the superlative form of adjectives, typical of
promotional discourse in general, whose use
is identified by Dann (1996) as one of the
features of tourism discourse, seen as a form
of ‘extreme language’
quoted from Pierini (2009)
 to intensify semantic values
 Table 3 on p.107

13.  the use of the premodifier very
◦ intensifying absolute adjectives with an in-built
superlative meaning, and superlatives
 Examples on p.108

14.  Discovering collocations: the Adjective +
Noun pattern

15.  Language on the 7 countries’ websites of
tourist information.
 Size: more than 90000 tokens

16.  Frequency wordlist (more than 20)
 Sematic categories of adjectives
 Group online corpus tasks