Target frames in British hotel websites

Abstract

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.

Recurrence, emotion and appropriateness in English and Spanish. The language of tourism on promotional websites

“…The corpus features are shown below: As shown above, this corpus is a medium-sized one under the generally accepted classification by Leech et al (1991), andBerber Sardinha (2002), followed as well by Vargas-Sierra (2012) among other scholars and experts on Corpus Linguistics. This is relevant in terms of representativeness, since specialised corpora are compiled to study only certain features of an LSP, so are normally smaller than a general language corpus -below 1 million words (Baker, 2010;Fuster Márquez & Pennock-Speck, 2015;Leech, 2007;Ornia, 2015, Parodi, 2004Vargas-Sierra, 2006).…”

Long Word Sequences in the Discourse of Adventure Tourism

“…For instance, structures of 3, 4, and 5 words have been analyzed in the field of applied linguistics [17]; 4-grams have been explored in scientific research articles [19]; complex nominals have been covered in the specialized domain of the environment [4]. As to the discourse of tourism, recurrent lexical bundles and phrase frames have been examined in hotel websites [11,12,13], concluding that the flexible elements of these sequences are content words which fill the slot in frames such as will be [required, charged] to or we are [happy, delighted] to. Regarding the subdomain of adventure tourism, two-word combinations have been covered both in English and Spanish [8,18,20], but longer sequences have not been examined yet.…”

“…In this context, formulaic language plays a key role. To date, research into chunks of language used in tourism have mostly focused on collocations [1,8,23], with a few works on longer sequences [11,12,13]. Bearing this in mind, this paper aims to contribute to the analysis of 4-word bundles in this domain, more specifically, in the segment of adventure tourism.…”

Persuading consumers: The use of conditional constructions in British hotel websites

“…Texts within hotel websites can be classified as either promotional or non-promotional, each text type being strategically allocated in different parts of the website. Non-promotional texts ‘deal with legal issues concerning the rights and obligations of the service providers and customers’ (Fuster-Márquez and Pennock-Speck, 2015: 55) and come under headings such as terms and conditions, privacy policy or cancellation ( policies ). These texts occupy the marginal areas of websites, and are usually long and devoid of multimedia support.…”