System and Corpus - Exploring Connections - Geoff Thompson †

System and Corpus - Exploring Connections - Geoff Thompson †

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

System and Corpus - Exploring Connections - Geoff Thompson †

Martin Kaltenbacher [+-]
University of Salzburg
Martin Kaltenbacher is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Salzburg, Austria. In his research, he applies methods of Systemic Functional Linguistics and corpus linguistics to media discourse, language of tourism and news commentary. He co-edited books on Multimodality (Ventola, E., Charles, C., Kaltenbacher, M. Perspectives on Multimodality, Benjamins) and on Discourse Studies (Gruber, H., Kaltenbacher, M., Muntigl, P. Empirical Approaches to Discourse Analysis, Peter Lang). For the past three years he has been collaborating on a corpus based, international project called Styles of Persuasion in Europe, the aim of which is to explore similarities and differences in newspaper commentary across more than 200 European newspapers from 13 different European countries.

Description

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.

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Citation

Kaltenbacher, Martin. Culture related linguistic differences in tourist websites: the emotive and the factual. A corpus analysis within the framework of Appraisal. System and Corpus - Exploring Connections. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. 269 - 292 Mar 2006. ISBN 9781845532512. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=19152. Date accessed: 24 Apr 2024 doi: 10.1558/equinox.19152. Mar 2006

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