Culture related linguistic differences in tourist websites: the emotive and the factual. A corpus analysis within the framework of Appraisal

Abstract

This paper will present an SFL-based corpus analysis of a particular micro-genre of tourist text, i.e. the tourist website. It will concentrate on encodings of interpersonal meaning expressed through resources categorised under the Appraisal system, and it will investigate how the foregrounding or absence of such interpersonal meanings can be related to popular cultural stereotypes held about certain language communities. For this purpose a corpus of approximately 1.1 million words has been compiled, which consists of an Austrian, an American and a Scottish sub-corpus of websites relating to tourism. It will be argued that the Appraisal framework as developed by Martin (2000) and White (1998, 2001) is particularly suited for corpus analysis. Some of the methodology proposed in this paper may contribute to bridging the gap between qualitative systemic analysis of individual texts and quantitative electronic analysis of large amounts of language data.