Objective or subjective adjectives? A case study on UNESCO Global Geopark tourism texts

Abstract

AbstractThis study depicts the usage of the adjectives in the UNESCO Global Geoparks (UGGp) tourism texts from English-speaking and non-English speaking countries. The aim of this paper is to find out if subjective adjectives are the main component of UGGp tourism texts as related to previous arguments. The texts analyzed in this research were collected from UGGp website. The tourism texts are nine texts from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (the UK) as English-speaking countries and ten texts from Indonesia as a non-English speaking country. All the texts are published on UGGp’s official website. The research method implemented is a mixed method, both qualitative and quantitative methods. Based on the result, both the UK and Indonesia UGGp tourism texts dominantly applied objective adjectives in comparison with subjective adjectives. The research findings are slightly different from the argument that subjective adjectives are commonly used in tourism discourse. Based on the conclusion, it can be inferred that objective adjectives are commonly used in UGGp texts, particularly in tourism texts. According to the researchers, the findings have the potential to aid writers of tourism texts in choosing adjectives.

Keywords

• Linguistics
• objective adjectives
• subjective adjectives
• tourism texts
• UNESCO global geoparks
• Jeroen van de Weijer, Shenzhen University, Prof. of Linguistics, College of International Studies, Nanhai Ave 3688, China