Metaphors we travel by: a corpus-assisted study of metaphors in promotional tourism discourse

Jaworska, S. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7465-2245 (2017) Metaphors we travel by: a corpus-assisted study of metaphors in promotional tourism discourse. Metaphor and Symbol, 32 (3). pp. 161-177. ISSN 1532-7868 doi: 10.1080/10926488.2017.1338018

Abstract/Summary

Despite the widely disseminated assumption that metaphors are the key persuasive devices in promoting tourist destinations specifically those located in tropical regions, there has been to date no systematic research investigating the use of figurative language in tourism promotional discourse. Using a corpus-assisted approach to the identification and analysis of metaphors supported by Wmatrix, this study attempts to establish empirically whether promotion of destinations culturally and geographically faraway does deploy more metaphors than marketing of tourist places ‘closer’ to home and what kind of conceptual mappings and metaphorical expressions are utilised. The results point to a significant increase of metaphor use in the descriptions of tropical destinations. Five domains BODY, NATURAL PRECIOUS ELEMENT, COLOUR, TASTE and RELIGION prove especially productive. The combinations of metaphorical expressions from these domains generate sensory fusions that appeal to multiple senses at once including vision, taste and imagination, and in doing so, potentially increase the ‘appetite’ for ‘consuming’ a destination. They also perform ideological work as devices in discourse that clandestinely perpetuates colonial legacies.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/69755
Identification Number/DOI	10.1080/10926488.2017.1338018
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Interdisciplinary Research Centres (IDRCs) > Centre for Literacy and Multilingualism (CeLM) Arts, Humanities and Social Science > School of Literature and Languages > English Language and Applied Linguistics Arts, Humanities and Social Science > Language Text and Power
Uncontrolled Keywords	metaphors, tourism, cultural distance, corpus-assisted study, conceptual mappings, Wmatrix, colonial legacy
Publisher	Taylor & Francis
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