Sensoriality, cognition and affectivity in the language of tourism promotion: a corpus-based analysis of perceptive verbs

Abstract

The language of tourism makes use of certain discursive elements which are manifestly promotional and persuasive in nature. Among these elements, verbs of perception play a crucial role in the early discursive representation of the tourist experience. In this paper we precisely aim to examine the verbs of sensory, cognitive and affective perception in promotional tourism discourse. On this basis, we carried out a discourse analysis based on a corpus of institutional web pages of tourist promotion written in Spanish. Firstly, a quantitative analysis was conducted with the purpose of identifying the perceptual verbal category with the highest presence and, secondly, the semantic preference of the most frequent verbs was analysed through the exploration of their habitual cooccurrences. The results point to cognition as the most numerous category and show, in addition, that perception is mainly represented through five verbal lemmas that manifest a particular collocational behaviour and a clear semantic preference within this type of discourse.