The promotional functionality of evaluative language in tourism discourse

Abstract

This study intends to investigate the use of evaluation in a corpus of British tourist brochures produced by tour operators specializing in the promotion of Italy. The theoretical framework is the Appraisal System developed mainly by White (1998, 2001) and Martin (2000) in order to study the discourse functions of evaluative resources. The creators of brochures resort mainly to two categories of Appraisal. The first concerns the expression of emotions (Affect), both in an implicit and explicit way, while the second category (Appreciation) includes aesthetic assessments. Evaluation can be amplified by several linguistic devices which either sharpen the margins of an experiential category or intensify the meaning of a word, like those lexical items which include an assessment of intensity as part of their semantic load. The iteration of evalua­tive meanings constructs a prosody, bringing an emotional and aesthetic colour to the whole text which in­volves the reader and increases the perceived value of a tourist destination.

Keywords

• Evaluation
• Promotion
• Appraisal
• Brochure
• Tourism