Hotel websites have been researched from the perspective of vocabulary and discourse. However, little attention has been paid to lexical bundles and phrase frames in these text types. In this paper, I show by means of an empirical analysis that such word sequences characterise these sites as a highly specialised domain. With this aim in mind, I have analysed a corpus of British hotel websites containing 242,000 words from a database, currently being compiled by the research group COMETVAL. I show that bundles and frames follow very similar principles but differ in flexibility. Moreover, the existence of frames shows collaboration between the idiom and open-choice principle. In fact, most bundles in my corpus are instances of phrase frames.

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This article centres on four-word phrase frames in British hospitality websites. Our aim is to identify those frames that are specific to this website genre, which we call target frames. Each phrase frame represents an identical sequence of words except for one variable word, that is A*BC or AB*D. The words that fill the slot, marked with an asterisk, are called fillers. We used a corpus-driven approach using KfNgram software to identify the phrase frames in our corpus (COMETVAL). We regard phrase frames as genre-specific when they are significantly more frequent than those found in the written section of the BNC, which represents General British English. We further filtered our selection of phrase frames by eliminating those which were not semantically homogenous with regard to the variable words they contained. Only in this way could the 76 phrase frames we identified be classified according to their primary discourse function. We contend that our study is a valuable addition to the literature on phraseology and can be of use in pedagogical and professional settings.KEYWORDS: lexical bundle, phrase frame, target frame, hotel websites, corpus linguistics, discourse. RESUMENEste artículo estudia los marcos fraseológicos de cuatro palabras en sitios web de la hostelería británica. Nos proponemos identificar aquellos marcos fraseológicos que son específicos de dicho género, y que denominamos 'marcos meta'. Cada marco fraseológico representa una secuencia idéntica de palabras a excepción de un elemento variable, es decir A*BC o AB*D. Los elementos variables rellenan el lugar indicado por el asterisco. Para identificar de partida estos marcos en nuestro corpus (COMETVAL), se ha utilizado el programa KfNgram. Hemos considerado que estos marcos fraseológicos son representativos de un género solo cuando muestran una mayor frecuencia significativa que en inglés británico general, representado aquí por el subcorpus escrito del BNC. Además hemos filtrado estos marcos mediante la eliminación de aquellos que contenían elementos variables semánticamente heterogéneos. Sólo así podrían los 76 marcos fraseológicos representar una función discursiva distintiva. Sostenemos que nuestro estudio es una estimable contribución a la investigación fraseológica y puede ser de utilidad en contextos pedagógicos y profesionales.PALABRAS CLAVE: paquete léxico, marco fraseológico, marco meta, sitios web de hoteles, lingüística de corpus, discurso.

Television commercials are often thought of as bothersome multimedia artefacts that by their very existence spoil our viewing pleasure at regular intervals. Not only that, but they seem to have the habit of ordering us around. This aspect of TV ads has often been commented on by experts and laypersons alike. Therefore, we decided to tackle this issue and look at the prototypical expression of directives, that is, imperatives in voice-overs in television commercials.To this end we have carried out an empirical analysis of imperatives in voice-overs in the MATVA corpus (Multimodal Analysis of TV Ads) which contains transcriptions of nearly 800 voice-overs in British TV ads recorded on six days during 2009, 2010 and 2011. We provide an exhaustive quantitative and qualitative profile of imperatives in contemporary TV advertising. This includes information on the distribution of imperatives, the most common verbs in imperative clauses, and their discourse function. We are also able to show conclusively that the directive force of imperatives in TV ads is more akin to advice or recommendation than commands, and explain from a discourse-pragmatic perspective why this is so.

Hotel websites display textual and non-textual strategies with the aim of turning online visitors into customers. This article focuses on two related textual aspects: how consumers are discursively construed and how conditional constructions are used in order to persuade and convince consumers of the adequacy of the hotel. The framework adopted for the analysis combines Stern's notion of 'implied consumer' with a corpus-driven approach. The corpus data comprises 114 British hotel websites and totals half a million words. This is a subcorpus of COMETVAL, a database compiled at the University of València. The results reveal the importance of a number of words that address consumers directly or indirectly. These words intertwine with others to form patterns that help establish a bond between hoteliers and their clients. Further exploration of the corpus confirmed that some conditional sequences such as if you and should you are used by advertisers to speculate about the needs and wishes of consumers that the hotel can fulfil for them. The analysis suggests that conditional structures are a distinctive discursive characteristic strongly associated with the dialogic nature of the discourse hotel websites.