Negative–positive adjective pairing in travel journalism in English, Italian, and Polish

Abstract

Adjectives play a particular role in the language of tourism and often contribute to the formation of recurrent phraseologies (Manca, 2008). The combination of adjectives bearing negative and positive connotation is widely reported in the literature (Dann, 1996; Edo Marzá, 2011, 2012). Durán-Muñoz (2019) focuses on the ADJ+but+ADJ pattern in an English language corpus of Adventure Tourism texts. This contribution examines the same pattern in 1M word corpora of travel journalism, examining examples in English, but also extending the analysis to Italian and Polish, to determine whether the pattern is limited to one language, or whether it is widely used as a discourse strategy within the same register, regardless of the code adopted.