On empathy in online tourism experience. High-frequency adjective patterns in English and Spanish promotional language

Abstract

This paper focuses on the identification and analysis of recurring adjective patterns in Spanish and English tourism promotional content available online. The study discusses how prototypical utterances may trigger empathy in each language, with high-frequency adjectives and emotional relevance being key in the addressees’ expectations as predictors of genuineness. This research offers a corpus-based approach to linguistic tendencies and presents empathy as a step beyond persuasion in translated or copywritten materials. To that end, a bilingual, ad hoc corpus recently compiled from institutional websites was examined in order to collect significant samples of persuasive elements in online tourism discourse. The results obtained show both common and contrastive aspects in the two languages, with empathy being preferably boosted under the assumption that positiveness and a specific proportion of frequent adjectives yield desirable effects among speakers of Spanish and English.