ALE161 國際行銷英文簡報技巧 International Marketing Presentation Techniques Michelle Li 2016.10

20161003 Adjectives in tourism English on the web Findings from the research Findings from the corpus Collocation Group tasks

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.

Adjectives 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)

Adjectives are used in Lehrer (1975) : the discourse of wine Carter (1998) : the discourse of cooking Coxhead (2003): a corpus of written Academic English from Pierini (2009)

The tourism industry 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)

Pierini (2009) The data are extracted from a small specialised corpus compiled by downloading the pages of British hotel Web sites.

The Web 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)

Pierini (2009) 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.

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

Exploring the semantics of adjectives Table 2 on p.104

to intensify semantic values Table 3 on p.107 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

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

Discovering collocations: the Adjective + Noun pattern

To our corpus Language on the 7 countries’ websites of tourist information. Size: more than 90000 tokens

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