Iberica 13
Ibérica 42 (2021): 163-190
ISSN: 1139-7241 / e-ISSN: 2340-2784
Abstract
Tourism is one of the most important specialized domains in Spain. For this
reason, many linguistic studies related to tourism texts have been carried out in
the last few years. In this work, we focus on three of the most frequent and
difficult textual genres written in Spanish in this domain: the informative article,
the travel blog post, and the rules and regulations (for tourist accommodation
facilities). The goals of this research are two: a) to carry out a linguistic analysis
of the three aforementioned genres from the tourism domain on the textual,
lexico-grammatical and discourse levels to gain a comprehensive understanding
of the features of these text types, and b) to compare these genres in order to
identify statistically significant differences among them and show that some
specific linguistic features are prototypical of each one. To achieve these goals,
we compiled a corpus in Spanish comprised of texts corresponding to the
analysed genres. Then, we analysed linguistic features from both a quantitative
and qualitative point of view. Finally, we carried out a comparative analysis using
statistical techniques that shed light on significant differences between the
genres.
Keywords: textual genres, tourism, corpus, linguistic features, statistical
analysis.
Resumen
Una comparación de géneros textuales en español: el caso del ámbito del turismo
Uno de los ámbitos especializados más importantes en España es el turismo. Por
esta razón, durante los últimos años se han realizado una gran cantidad de
Comparing textual genres in Spanish: the
case of the tourism domain
Iria da Cunha, M. Amor Montané, Beatriz Fisas & M. Ángeles Escobar
Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) (Spain), Universitat
de Barcelona (UB) (Spain) & Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) (Spain)
iriad@flog.uned.es, amor.montane@ub.edu, beatriz.fisas@upf.edu &
maescobar@flog.uned.es
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IrIA DA CUNhA, M. AMor MoNTANé, BEATrIz FISAS & M. ÁNGElES ESCoBAr
estudios lingüísticos relacionados con textos turísticos. En este trabajo, nos
centramos en tres de los géneros textuales en español más frecuentes y difíciles
de escribir en este ámbito: el artículo de divulgación, la entrada de blog de viajero
y la normativa (de alojamiento turístico). Esta investigación persigue dos
objetivos: a) llevar a cabo un análisis lingüístico de los tres géneros mencionados
del ámbito del turismo teniendo en cuenta tres niveles (textual, léxico y
discursivo), para obtener una caracterización global de los rasgos de este tipo de
textos, y b) comparar estos géneros para identificar diferencias estadísticamente
significativas entre ellos y probar que algunos rasgos lingüísticos son específicos
de cada uno. Para lograr estos objetivos, hemos compilado un corpus en español
formado por textos correspondientes a los géneros analizados. A continuación,
hemos analizado rasgos lingüísticos, tanto desde un punto de vista cuantitativo
como cualitativo. Finalmente, hemos llevado a cabo un análisis comparativo
mediante técnicas estadísticas, que mostraron diferencias significativas entre los
géneros.
Palabras clave: géneros textuales, turismo, corpus, rasgos lingüísticos,
análisis estadístico.
1. Introduction
Nowadays, the accurate writing of specialised texts has become a relevant
activity for professionals. These texts are not easy to write, since textual
genres produced in the context of specialised communication have specific
characteristics that authors must bear in mind (Cabré, 1999; Gotti, 2008).
Furthermore, these characteristics vary across domains and genres (van Dijk,
1989; Swales, 1990; Bhatia, 1993).
Tourism is one of the most important specialised domains in Spain, since it
is a key economic pillar of the country. For this reason, many linguistic
studies related to this domain have been carried out. They focus both on
traditional genres (such as travel itineraries and informative articles), and on
emerging genres (such as travel websites and travel blog posts). Calvi (2006
& 2010) and Calvi and Mapelli (2011) proposed an approach for classifying
them and offer a detailed analysis of some genres generated in this domain.
Based on the list of genres gathered in these papers, da Cunha and Montané
(2019) analysed the most frequently occurring genres representing the
greatest writing difficulties for university students and tourism professionals
in Spain. The informative article, the travel blog post, and the rules and
regulations (for tourist accommodation facilities) were three of the most
164
frequent and difficult genres written in Spanish in the tourism domain.
Moreover, the greatest writing difficulties detected were related to textual
structure, selection of contents, lexical choices, text cohesion, and degree of
formality.
Against this backdrop, this article aims to:
(a) Carry out a linguistic analysis of the three aforementioned textual
genres from the tourism domain on the textual, lexico-grammatical
and discourse levels to gain a comprehensive understanding of the
features of these text types.
(b) Compare these textual genres in order to identify statistically
significant differences among them and prove that some specific
linguistic features are prototypical of each one, according to the
assumptions exposed in Section 4.
To achieve these objectives, a corpus-based methodology was used, since as
Breeze (2019: 79-80) states:
Corpus-based methods offer a useful way to approach specialised genres,
since their strength lies in their ability to detect what is characteristic about
texts of a conventionalised nature. By finding what is particularly frequent,
or infrequent, in a particular corpus, it is possible to understand more about
how language is used – and therefore how meaning is made – in those texts.
Thus, we compiled a corpus comprised of informative articles, travel blog
posts, and rules and regulations written in Spanish. Then, we analysed
different linguistic categories from both a quantitative and qualitative point
of view. Finally, we carried out a comparative analysis using statistical
techniques that shed light on significant differences between the analysed
genres.
Section 2 includes a review of the main publications about tourism genres.
Section 3 introduces our theoretical frameworks. Section 4 sets out the main
assumptions of the work. Section 5 explains our methodology, while Section
6 offers a linguistic characterization of the genres according to the proposed
corpus. Section 7 contains a statistical design to deal with our comparative
analysis of the tourism texts under stake, and Section 8 discusses the results.
Finally, Section 9 lays out conclusions and provides some pointers for future
work.
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2. Literature review
Traditional tourism genres, such as guidebooks, tourism brochures, travel
itineraries or informative articles, have been the object of many studies over
the years (Calvi, 2006). Calvi (2010) also stresses the need for focusing on
new forms of communication that have been developed in the Internet age,
such as institutional websites and blogs. Some authors have focused on these
emerging genres in the tourism domain, including blogs and Internet forums
(Mapelli & Piccioni, 2011), blogs and travel websites (Martínez Escalona,
2012), travel blogs written by non-professionals (Goethals, 2013), tourism
newsletters (rodríguez Abella, 2014), and hotel websites (Cheng, 2016;
Suau-Jiménez & Piqué-Noguera, 2017). In this context, Calvi and Mapelli
(2011) proposed a multi-functional and multi-dimensional classification that
underscores the complexity of textual genres in this domain, which tend to
be unconventional and of a relatively hybrid nature. For instance, tourism
reports are related with economics, tourism rules and regulations with law,
and tourism informative articles with journalism. owing to this hybrid
nature, in general, the analysis of tourism genres is challenging, since
determining their macrostructure and formal features is difficult (Calvi,
2011).
The analysis of tourism genres in Spanish has been carried out from several
approaches, taking different linguistic features into account. The vast
majority of previous studies focused on specific genres. For example, in
Mapelli and Piccioni (2011), 13 morphosyntactic features were analysed
(adverbs, verbal tenses and persons, and pronouns, among others) in a
corpus of nine genres, using Parodi’s (2005) multi-dimensional methodology.
other studies have also analysed morphosyntactic features, such as deixis
and discourse modalisation in travel itineraries (Ares, 2011), and adjectives,
verbal tenses and persons in tourism webpages (rodríguez Abella, 2011).
Pragmatics and discourse features have been studied as well, for example,
discourse voices in travel reports (Canals & liverani, 2011), interpersonal
metadiscourse in institutional webpages (Suau-Jiménez, 2011), linguistic
elements expressing ideology in Spanish touristic laws (Carpi, 2011),
interpersonal discourse in travel forums (Suau-Jiménez, 2014), pragmatic
and textual strategies in hotel reviews (Goethals, 2016), and hedging in
research articles and hotel websites (Suau-Jiménez & Piqué-Noguera, 2017).
other relevant features analysed in the literature are related with the lexicon
used in tourism genres, such as verbs of perception in guidebooks and
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tourist advertising (Pérez Vázquez, 2011), specialised collocations in tourism
webpages (Navarro & Miotti, 2011), lexical variation in hotel promotion
websites (Sanmartín, 2011), lexical choices in guidebooks (Mapelli, 2013),
and lexicon of cultural heritage in travel blogs and online travel reports
(Pano, 2019). other research that has also focused on the lexicon in tourism,
especially on terminology and neology, is found in Calvi (2016), where a
bilingual and comparable Spanish-Italian corpus was used. This included
travel itineraries, reports, advertising posts, travel blog posts and travel forum
posts, among other genres.
Despite the studies carried out in the tourism domain so far, Calvi (2011)
pointed out that more research on the structural configuration and rhetorical
moves of tourism genres is lacking. In this context, our work is innovative in
various ways. It simultaneously analyses three sets of linguistic features
(textual, lexico-grammatical and discourse features) from both a qualitative
and quantitative point of view. It also compares three genres, using a corpus
of texts written in Spanish, automatic Natural language Processing (NlP)
tools, and statistical techniques. Concerning the selected genres, the
informative article has been analysed before (Calvi, 2006), as well as the
travel blog post (Mapelli & Piccioni, 2011). Nevertheless, to our knowledge,
a comparative corpus-based linguistic analysis between these two genres has
not been carried out from a quantitative point of view and taking the textual,
lexico-grammatical and discourse features proposed in this study into
account. Moreover, the rules and regulations genre (in the context of tourist
accommodation facilities) has not been previously analysed or compared to
other genres in the same domain.
3. Theoretical framework
This section summarises the key features of the theoretical frameworks
adopted for the corpus analysis. Each one deals with a linguistic level: textual,
lexico-grammatical and discourse levels.
In the first place, we discuss two approaches regarding the textual level.
Following van Dijk (1977), we may identify different textual genres
according to a clearly codified and widely accepted pattern. For example, the
research article usually consists of different sections: Introduction, Problem,
Solution and Conclusions. We also follow van Dijk (1989) and assume a
textual superstructure, which provides the general organisation of each type
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of text. The superstructure shows different sections, and some of them
include titles and subtitles. In addition, according to Swales (1990), some
passages of the text can be considered as moves. A move “represents a
stretch of text serving a particular communicative (that is, semantic)
function” (Upton & Cohen, 2009: 589). We use these moves to characterise
the textual structure of the genres of our corpus, along the same lines as the
corpus-based analysis proposed by Biber et al. (2007).
In the second place, concerning the lexico-grammatical level, we follow the
Communicative Theory of Terminology (CTT) by Cabré (1999). According
to the CTT, textual genres produced in specialised domains have some global
characteristics, such as precision, concision, systematicity, impersonality and
objectivity. These characteristics are expressed through different linguistic
features. For example, the passive voice is used to express impersonality,
while the absence of subjectivity markers implies objectivity, and so on
(Cabré et al., 2010).
In the third place, with regard to the discourse level, we use Mann and
Thompson’s (1988) rhetorical Structure Theory (rST). This theory describes
how texts are organised in terms of discourse relations between the text’s
discourse segments (sometimes marked explicitly using discourse
connectors). We follow the definition of discourse segment put forward by
Tofiloski et al. (2009: 77):
Discourse segmentation is the process of decomposing discourse into
elementary discourse units (EDUs), which may be simple sentences or clauses
in a complex sentence, and from which discourse trees are constructed.
In sum, to carry out the linguistic analysis of our corpus, we assume the
main proposals of the aforementioned frameworks. First, superstructure and
moves are used in the textual level. Second, the global characteristics of texts
produced in specialised domains are employed in the lexico-grammatical
level. Third, discourse segments, relations and connectors characterise the
discourse level.
4. Assumptions
This study starts from several assumptions related to the textual, lexico-
grammatical and discourse levels, following the theoretical frameworks
mentioned in Section 3. The three general assumptions are the following:
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1. The three genres have dissimilar textual, lexico-grammatical and
discourse features, on the assumption that “rules and regulations” is
the most different genre because of its hybrid nature bridging the
legal and the tourism domain.
2. Within the digital media, new genres (such as the travel blog post),
which may share target reader and function with traditional genres
(such as the informative article), are emerging. These genres might be
similar in some specific aspects. Nevertheless, as their communication
channel is not the same, they could also differ in some lexico-
grammatical and discourse features that would make it possible to
differentiate them.
3. The textual, lexico-grammatical and discourse features in informative
articles are fixed, as much as in rules and regulations, as they are
considered traditional genres. In contrast, there is more room for
creativity in the travel blog posts.
The specific assumption related to the textual level is the following:
1. The texts corresponding to the travel blog post and the informative
article contain many different sections, titles and moves, depending on
the subjects discussed in each text. The texts corresponding to the rules
and regulations genre include fewer different sections, titles and moves.
The assumptions concerning the lexico-grammatical level are the following:
1. In rules and regulations, subjective elements are scarce. In travel blog
posts and informative articles, subjective elements are usually
employed.
2. In the three genres, active voice is mainly employed, as it is usual in
Spanish. This voice is more frequent in the travel blog post.
3. Verbs in the first person singular and plural are used in all three
genres. The travel blog post is the genre in which the first person
singular is used more frequently.
Finally, the assumptions related to the discourse level are the following:
1. Travel blog posts include more sentences than informative articles,
and rules and regulations.
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2. In travel blog posts, complex sentences are usually divided into
discourse segments, which are marked through connectors. In
informative articles, and rules and regulations, discourse segmentation
and connectors are not so frequent.
3. In informative articles and in travel blog posts, argumentative
strategies are often used. Therefore, authors usually include
connectors to mark discourse relations aiming to contrast (such as
Antithesis, Concession and Contrast), to express reasons to visit a
place or make a trip (such as Cause) or to explain the aim of a trip
(such as Purpose). reformulation strategies are also used in these two
genres. Thus, authors use connectors to mark relations of
restatement and Summary, in order to offer additional information to
the readers to clarify the text. In the rules and regulations genre, all
those connectors are scarcely used.
4. In rules and regulations, and in travel blog posts, connectors
expressing Condition are usually employed. In informative articles,
the Condition relation is used less as a discourse strategy.
5. Corpus methodology
5.1 Building the corpus
As noted above, this study considers three tourism-related genres:
informative articles, travel blog posts, and rules and regulations. According
to Calvi’s (2010) classification, an informative article falls within the
publishing genre, and would normally be included in a travel or tourism
magazine, providing tourist information about a place. A travel blog post lies
within the informal genre, derived from the interactive modalities of digital
communication (Dann & liebman, 2007), offering information about a trip.
rules and regulations are a legal genre stemming from the legal domain and
applied to regulate tourism-related activities (Calvi, 2010).
The corpus comprises 20 texts per genre making a total of 60 texts from the
tourism domain (see Table 1).
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Table 1. Corpus statistics.
Texts were selected from a wide variety of sources:
- 20 informative articles from five Spanish travel magazines: Viajar, El
Viajero, Horizontes, Top Viajes and Revista Ibérica (four articles each).
- 20 travel blog posts written by specialised Spanish travel bloggers,
including Paco Nadal, Nani Arenas and lucía Sánchez.
- 20 sets of rules and regulations from tourist accommodation facilities
placed in different Spanish regions, such as hotel route 42 (Castilla-
la Mancha), hotel Celta Galaico (Galicia) and hotel Atarazanas
(Andalucía).
5.2. Categories of analysis
In Appendix 1, the categories corresponding to the linguistic features
analysed in this work are listed. on the textual level, the following three
categories were considered:
- “Sections” used to structure the text, that is, each of the sections that
could be clearly identified, either because section breaks were included
or because their topic was distinct. For example, in an informative
article, sections included “heading”, “Introduction”, “Body”, and
“Appendix”.
- “Titles” included at the beginning of each section. For example, the
“Appendix” section of an informative article includes the title “A
Practical Guide.”
- “Moves” found in each section, that is, semantic and functional
textual units with a specific communicative purpose.1 For example, the
“Introduction” section of a travel blog post includes “Photo”, “Photo
caption”, “Blogger’s thoughts (reason for writing)”, and “links to
websites”.
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Textual genre Number of texts Number of words
Informative article 20 34,532
Travel blog post 20 25,440
Rules and regulations 20 40,277
Total 60 100,249
!
!
!
!
!
!
on the lexico-grammatical level, two categories serve to analyse the corpus.
on this level, we combine both morphosyntactic features related to verbal
aspects (such as voice and number) and specific lexical units that indicate
subjectivity. Details are given below:
- Morphosyntactic features, specifically, the use of the “active and
passive voices”, and the use of the “first person singular and plural”.
- “Subjectivity markers”, based on a clearly defined group of subjective
units (otaola, 1988), such as superlatives and nouns, adjectives and
adverbs conveying opinion. For example: desgraciadamente
(“unfortunately”), quizás (“perhaps”) or peor (“worse”).
Finally, on the discourse level, the following three categories are relevant:
- “Sentences”, considering that they are word sequences starting from
an upper-case letter and ending with a period, question mark, or
exclamation mark.
- “Discourse segments” (Tofiloski et al., 2009). Specifically, we use the
criteria for discourse segmentation most used in Spanish (Iruskieta, da
Cunha & Taboada, 2015). Examples 1 and 2 include sentences in
Spanish extracted from two different rules and regulations in our
corpus (with their corresponding translation into English). In these
sentences, the different discourse segments are indicated in square
brackets.
1. [En caso de que la salida del pasajero se efectúe antes de la fecha estipulada
en la reserva,] [no se procederá a efectuar ningún reembolso.]
[In case a guest departs before the date indicated in the booking
confirmation,] [no refund will be issued.]
2. [A los clientes que no pongan a disposición sus habitaciones durante esas
horas no se les realizará la limpieza de la habitación,] [aunque se les podrán
reponer consumibles.]
[Should you not make your room available during the stipulated
cleaning period, your room will not be cleaned,] [although
consumable goods may be replaced.]
- “Discourse connectors” related to eight rST discourse relations:
Antithesis, Cause, Concession, Condition, Contrast, Purpose,
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restatement and Summary.2 These relations were selected because
they occur most frequently in the RsT spanish Treebank3 and are also
regularly indicated in this corpus using connectors. The connectors
associated with the aforementioned relations and considered for the
sake of this study were extracted from da Cunha et al. (2011). For
instance, in reference to the examples set out earlier: in example 1, the
connector en caso de (“in case”), which expresses Condition, is detected
at the beginning of the first segment of the sentence, and, in example
2, the connector aunque (“although”), which expresses Concession, is
detected between the two segments included in the sentence.
5.3. Semi-automatic corpus analysis
The linguistic analysis of the aforementioned levels of the corpus took place
in two phases. First, data were manually extracted for sections, titles and
moves (from the textual level). Second, the remaining data were extracted
automatically (from the lexico-grammatical and discourse levels), by using
the following automatic NlP tools: A morphosyntactic analyser (Freeling;
Atserias et al., 2006), and a discourse segmentation system (Diseg; da Cunha
et al., 2012).
5.4. Model structures elaboration
In order to characterise genres from a textual point of view, similarities in
the sections, titles and moves of each of the three analysed genres were
measured. A frequency threshold of 50% was established to determine
relevance. Consequently, if the same section, title or move appeared in at
least 50% of texts corresponding to a genre, it was deemed to be a relevant
feature of that genre. This information was utilised to design a model
structure including the sections, titles and moves that tend to appear most
frequently in texts for each genre.
5.5. Linguistic characterisation of the genres
The study also analysed the lexico-grammatical and discourse features
mentioned in Section 5.2. To characterise the genres, the averages of the
different analysed linguistic features were used. As the texts included in the
corpus had different sizes (see Table 1), the data were normalised by using
the frequency per million words (fpmw, Biber et al., 1998).4 The fpmw is
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Ibérica 42 (2021): 163-190 173
calculated dividing the absolute frequency of the analysed linguistic
characteristic by the total number of words in the corpus; the result is
multiplied by 1 million. The equation can be represented in this way:
fpmw = (absolute frequency/number of words in the corpus) ×
1,000,000
6. Linguistic analysis of the corpus
This section includes our proposal of model structures of the three genres
from the tourism domain. Moreover, we provide the results of the linguistic
analysis on the textual, lexico-grammatical and discourse levels, giving a
comprehensive overview of the most outstanding features of each genre.
6.1. Model structures
As explained in Section 5.4, sections, titles and moves were selected taking a
frequency threshold into account, in order to design a model structure
including those that tend to appear most frequently in each genre.
Appendices 2, 3 and 4 offer the model structures for the three genres:
informative article, travel blog post, and rules and regulations, respectively.5
6.2. Linguistic characterisation
In this section, we provide and discuss the normalised averages of the
analysed features for each genre. In the first place, the quantitative results
related to the informative article are shown in Table 2.
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Table 2. Normalised averages related to analysed data for the informative article genre.
on the textual level, taking the averages correlation between sections and
titles into account, we observe that each section of the informative article
genre usually contained more than one title. Moreover, each section tended
to include several moves (more than seven per section). on the lexico-
grammatical level, the occurrences of subjective units were noteworthy,
taking into account the number of sentences of the corpus: one out of five
sentences included at least one subjective unit. In this genre, the active voice
was primarily used rather than the passive voice. Moreover, verbs in the first
person singular were used more frequently than verbs in the first person
plural. on the discourse level, sentences comprised one or two discourse
segments. The most frequent connectors expressed Antithesis and
Condition. There were no connectors expressing Summary.
In the second place, the quantitative results related to the travel blog post are
included in Table 3.
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Textual level Lexical level Discourse level
Feature Average Feature Average Feature Average
Nº of sections 3,352.1 Nº of subjective
units
7,736.8 Nº of sentences 42,830.0
Nº of titles 4,030.8 Nº of verbs in the
active voice
98,506.5 Nº of discourse segments 68,544.0
Nº of moves 24,020.9 Nº of verbs in the
passive voice
840.6 Total Nº of connectors 6,298.9
Nº of verbs in the
first person singular
3,102.7 Nº of connectors expressing
Antithesis
2,142.2
Nº of verbs in the
first person plural
1,685.1 Nº of connectors expressing
Cause
1,054.4
Nº of connectors expressing
Concession
964.1
Nº of connectors expressing
Condition
1,801.9
Nº of connectors expressing
Contrast
41.6
Nº of connectors expressing
Purpose
230.0
Nº of connectors expressing
Restatement
64.7
Nº of connectors expressing
Summary
0.0
Table 3. Normalised averages related to analysed data for the travel blog post genre.
In this genre, on the textual level, each section contained around one title in
average. In addition, more than five moves per section were included. on the
lexico-grammatical level, the occurrences of subjective units were
remarkable, taking into account that one out of four sentences of the corpus
showed at least one of these units. Furthermore, this genre predominantly
used the active voice, as passive voice was very unusual in this kind of texts.
Finally, the analysis revealed that first person singular verbs appeared more
frequently than first person plural verbs. on the discourse level, sentences
often comprised almost two discourse segments in average. The most
frequent connectors expressed, again, Condition and Antithesis. There were
no connectors expressing Summary and restatement.
In the third place, the quantitative results related to the rules and regulations
are shown in Table 4.
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Textual level Lexical level Discourse level
Feature Average Feature Average Feature Average
Nº of sections 4,691.7 Nº of subjective
units
11,441.1 Nº of sentences 51,432.3
Nº of titles 4,742.7 Nº of verbs in the
active voice
129,272.3 Nº of discourse segments 87,596.6
Nº of moves 26,616.3 Nº of verbs in the
passive voice
592.8 Total Nº of connectors 11,525.0
Nº of verbs in the
first person singular
10,685.9 Nº of connectors expressing
Antithesis
3,749.1
Nº of verbs in the
first person plural
3,223.0 Nº of connectors expressing
Cause
1,872.5
Nº of connectors expressing
Concession
1,128.1
Nº of connectors expressing
Condition
4,158.7
Nº of connectors expressing
Contrast
108.2
Nº of connectors expressing
Purpose
508.4
Nº of connectors expressing
Restatement
0.0
Nº of connectors expressing
Summary
0.0
I
Table 4. Normalised averages related to analysed data for the rules and regulations genre.
In this genre, on the textual level, sections contained more than four titles in
average. Moreover, each section tended to include about 13 moves. on the
lexico-grammatical level, we highlight that subjective units were barely used
in the corpus, since only one out of 13 sentences of the corpus included
these units. Again, in this genre the active voice was primarily used rather
than the passive voice. Finally, first person singular verbs appeared more
frequently than first person plural verbs. on the discourse level, sentences
rarely comprised more than one discourse segment. The most frequent
connectors expressed Condition. There were no connectors expressing
Summary and Contrast.
7. Statistical design
In order to check that the proposed features allow us to characterise the
different types of texts analysed in this work, this section includes a statistical
design given the following hypotheses:
• Null hypothesis (h0): There are no differences between the textual
genres considering the textual, lexico-grammatical and discourse
features proposed in this work (see Sections 4 and 5.2).
• Alternate hypothesis (our claim): There are differences between
CoMPArING TExTUAl GENrES IN SPANISh: ThE CASE oF ThE ToUrISM DoMAIN
Ibérica 42 (2021): 163-190 177
Textual level Lexical level Discourse level
Feature Average Feature Average Feature Average
Nº of sections 1,405.7 Nº of subjective
units
3,961.3 Nº of sentences 52,146.3
Nº of titles 6,111.6 Nº of verbs in the
active voice
94,439.3 Nº of discourse segments 76,791.2
Nº of moves 19,252.3 Nº of verbs in the
passive voice
2,030.8 Total Nº of connectors 6,576.2
Nº of verbs in the
first person singular
5,715.0 Nº of connectors expressing
Antithesis
482.6
Nº of verbs in the
first person plural
1,513.5 Nº of connectors expressing
Cause
176.8
Nº of connectors expressing
Concession
243.5
Nº of connectors expressing
Condition
5,046.5
Nº of connectors expressing
Contrast
0.0
Nº of connectors expressing
Purpose
472.1
Nº of connectors expressing
Restatement
154.7
Nº of connectors expressing
Summary
0.0
!
!
textual genres considering the aforementioned features proposed in
this work.
As Cantos (2002) explains, the quantitative analysis of linguistic features
allows us to characterise specialised domains and genres. Nevertheless, the
same author (Cantos, 2002: 241) highlights the relevance of statistical
significance:
We cannot decide just by looking at these figures; we need to perform a
further calculation: a test of statistical significance and determine how high
or low the probability is that the difference between the two corpora on these
features is due to chance.
Thus, in this study, several statistical tests were conducted to compare the
normalised data across the three linguistic levels (following Barón & Téllez,
2004). To do so, the categories corresponding to the analysed features are
used as statistical variables. levene’s test was used to analyse normal
distribution. later, different tests were run to compare averages. An analysis
of variance (ANoVA) test was conducted to determine if it was possible to
differentiate among genres for parametric variables,6 while the Kruskal-
Wallis test for independent samples was utilized for non-parametric
variables.7 Subsequently, in order to determine if there were statistically
significant differences among specific genres, post hoc multiple comparison
tests were conducted. Based on the results of levene’s test, either Tukey’s
hSD test (for variables with equal within-group variance) or Dunnett’s T3 test
(for variables with unequal variances) was utilised. Finally, a discriminant
analysis was conducted to describe significant differences among the genres.
Concerning the textual level, the statistical tests revealed statistically
significant differences among genres for two textual variables. For the “Nº
of moves” variable, when genre pairs were compared, the travel blog post
and the rules and regulations had significant differences (p = .018). hence,
we reject the h0, and validate the alternate hypothesis. In fact, the travel blog
post included the most moves, whereas the latter, fewer moves. For the “Nº
of sections” variable, the rules and regulations genre differed the most from
the other genres, informative article (p = .001) and travel blog post (p =
.000), because it contained fewer sections than the other two genres, as
expected. regarding the “Nº of titles”, no significant differences were found
among genres. Therefore, the alternate hypothesis related to the textual
features was partially validated.
IrIA DA CUNhA, M. AMor MoNTANé, BEATrIz FISAS & M. ÁNGElES ESCoBAr
Ibérica 42 (2021): 163-190178
With regard to the lexico-grammatical level, statistical tests did identify
statistically significant differences for four out of the five analysed variables.
For the “Nº of subjective units” variable, the three genres differed
significantly (p < .05), as expected, given that the number of these units in
each genre varied. In the rules and regulations genre, they were very scarce.
Moreover, we found that subjectivity is a key feature of the travel blog post,
since it contains more subjective units than the other two genres.
Concerning morphosyntactic verbal features, for the “Nº of verbs in the
passive voice” and “Nº of verbs in the active voice” variables, the h0 was
rejected, since we obtained significant differences (p < .05). This result may
be due to the fact that the travel blog post rarely exhibits passive voice, since
it prioritizes the use of active voice. With respect to the variables related to
verbal persons, the significant differences were only found between the
informative article and the travel blog post (p = .01) concerning the first
person singular. The latter is the genre where the first person singular was
used more frequently. Surprisingly, no differences regarding this variable
were found between the travel blog post, and rules and regulations. hence,
the alternate hypothesis related to the lexico-grammatical features was
partially validated.
In relation with the discourse level, statistical differences were found for six
variables. No significant differences were found among genres regarding the
number of sentences. The informative article and the travel blog post
differed significantly between them for the variables “Nº of discourse
segments” (p = .002) and “total Nº of connectors” (p = .001), the second
being the genre where more segments and connectors were detected.
regarding the variable “total Nº of connectors,” the travel blog post also
contained significantly more connectors than rules and regulations (p =
.002). These two results allowed us to reject the h0.
In the case of the variables related to specific connectors, the rules and
regulations genre had more differences from the others concerning the use
of connectors expressing Antithesis, Concession and Cause (p < .05). These
connectors were scarcely used in this genre, as expected. Nevertheless, we
did not find significant differences among genres in the use of connectors
expressing Purpose, Contrast, restatement and Summary. In the case of
Purpose connectors, they were used in the texts of the three genres and their
frequency was similar. In the case of the other connectors, their frequency
in the corpus was so low that it was not possible to obtain statistical
CoMPArING TExTUAl GENrES IN SPANISh: ThE CASE oF ThE ToUrISM DoMAIN
Ibérica 42 (2021): 163-190 179
significance. regarding the use of connectors expressing Condition, the
statistical results showed that the informative article had differences with the
travel blog post (p = .01), and rules and regulations (p = .000). In these two
genres, this kind of connectors was more frequent, as we had anticipated.
Consequently, the alternate hypothesis concerning the discourse features was
also partially validated.
Finally, the results of a discriminant analysis revealed statistically significant
differences between the three genres. The classification of genres proved to
be rather suitable, since 93.3% of texts were assigned to the correct genre.
Cross validation results were also acceptable, since 90.0% of texts were
correctly classified. results are depicted graphically in Figure 1.
Figure 1. Results of the discriminant analysis in graphic format.
Centroids (that is, the mean discriminant score for each group) were clearly
distinct for all the genres, which fell far from one another. The distance was
furthest for the rules and regulations, implying that this genre has more
dissimilar textual, lexico-grammatical and discourse features. In addition,
texts from different genres hardly overlapped. only a few texts from the
travel blog post genre overlapped with texts from the informative article
genre, since they are similar in some specific aspects.
Finally, the largest dispersion was found for the travel blog post, implying
that texts in this genre most differ from each other. Conversely, the
informative article and the rules and regulations genres had the least degree
IrIA DA CUNhA, M. AMor MoNTANé, BEATrIz FISAS & M. ÁNGElES ESCoBAr
Ibérica 42 (2021): 163-190180
of dispersion, indicating that the features of the texts corresponding to each
genre tend to be similar. Thus, the discriminant analysis supported that the
three genres analysed have linguistic characteristics that allow us to
differentiate them from each other, which validates our hypothesis and
confirms the three general assumptions included in Section 4.
8. Discussion
In this section, we discuss the significant differences obtained from the
statistical analysis, which concern the assumptions mentioned in Section 4.
With regard to the textual level, we proved that there are significant
differences between the travel blog post and the rules and regulations
regarding the inclusion of moves, and between the three genres concerning
the number of sections. The texts corresponding to the travel blog post
genre include many different moves, depending on the subjects discussed in
each post. By contrast, the texts corresponding to the rules and regulations
genre include fewer different moves, since these moves coincide among the
texts. In the case of sections, something similar happens: rules and
regulations also include many sections, but these sections are common to
most of the texts in our corpus. Nevertheless, in the travel blog post and in
the informative article there is a smaller number of sections, but these
sections do not usually coincide among the different texts of the corpus.
These differences are due to the hybrid nature between the legal and the
tourism domain of rules and regulations, which follows a prototypical
textual structure, based on legal articles (for example, “Article 1”, “Article 2”,
“Article 3”). Thus, the features of the legal domain would affect the global
characterisation of this tourism genre. In fact, Calvi (2011) indicates that not
all genres commonly used in tourism communication are specific to the
sector: some of them belong rather to related fields, and hardly undergo
changes when moving to the sphere of tourism. This is what happens with
rules and regulations, which properly belong to the legal field.
Concerning the lexico-grammatical level, we proved that the presence of
subjective units is a lexical feature that allows us to differentiate between
genres. In rules and regulations, subjective units are scarce, since the texts of
this genre must be objective, because they have some characteristics of legal
texts, as mentioned. Moreover, they should tend to impersonality, like legal
contracts (Alcaraz, hugues & Gómez, 2014). however, in the travel blog
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Ibérica 42 (2021): 163-190 181
post, subjective units are very frequent: as authors express their own travel
experiences, the content is more personal. In informative articles, subjective
units are also included, since they provide tourist information about a place.
Therefore, these genres are not so objective. As Calvi (2011) states, the
discourse of tourism tends to move away from the subjective vision of the
travel stories, but it recovers this vision in genres such as the travel blog,
which is related to autobiographical genres. Nevertheless, our findings
indicate that subjective units are more frequent in travel blog posts than in
informative articles. This result makes us think that, as informative articles
are published in a travel or tourism magazine, they are expected to be more
objective than travel blog posts.
We also statistically evidenced that the active voice is a morphosyntactic
feature that characterizes the travel blog post. This result seems to indicate
that travel bloggers tend to use active voice in order to explain their own trip
more dynamically and to emphasise the grammatical subject. We proved too
that the first person singular allows differentiation between the travel blog
post and the informative article. This feature is more frequent in the travel
blog post since it resembles the genre of autobiography (Calvi, 2011). In
addition, as Mapelli and Piccioni (2011) have pointed out, on the one hand,
the travel blog post is associated with a situational context of continuum
(that is, chronological storytelling) and, on the other hand, it shares features
with informal communication. In the informative article, the use of the first
person singular is not as recurrent, because it is a more formal genre.
regarding the discourse level, our results showed that the travel blog post
is the genre with most connectors. These results confirm that travel
bloggers try to write clear and dynamic texts, and, thus, they tend to divide
complex sentences into segments (usually, marked through connectors), in
order for the recipient to easily understand the texts. In the case of
connectors corresponding to argumentative strategies, our results showed
that connectors of Antithesis, Concession and Cause are scarcely used in
rules and regulations: first, because of the schematic format of this genre
and, second, because these argumentative strategies using connectors
would be unnecessary in this kind of texts. By contrast, in informative
articles and in travel blog posts, argumentative strategies are often used.
Therefore, authors usually include discourse relations aiming to contrast
(Antithesis and Concession) and to express reasons to visit a place or make
a trip (Cause).
IrIA DA CUNhA, M. AMor MoNTANé, BEATrIz FISAS & M. ÁNGElES ESCoBAr
Ibérica 42 (2021): 163-190182
We also demonstrated that connectors expressing Condition are usually
employed in rules and regulations and in travel blog posts, while they are not
common in informative articles. In the case of rules and regulations, this
would be due to the inclusion of different legal articles that usually contain
conditions, as mentioned in Alcaraz, hugues and Gómez (2014), which must
be met by both the guests and the tourist accommodation (for example, “If
the guest leaves the room after 12 noon, a penalty must be paid”). In the case
of the travel blog post, as bloggers try to involve the readers, the use of the
Condition relation is one of the strategies employed to motivate readers to
visit a specific place (for example, “If you go to that city, don’t miss visiting its
cathedral”). on the contrary, informative articles are usually more descriptive
and the Condition relation would be less used as a discourse strategy.
It is interesting to note that, although in this work we assume that there are
differences between rules and regulations and the other two genres, the
results show that they are not so different regarding some linguistic features.
Some of these features are the number of sentences included in the texts,
the number of segments, the total number of connectors, and the
connectors expressing Condition.
lastly, the discriminant analysis supported the notion that the three genres
analysed have linguistic characteristics that allow us to differentiate between
them. rules and regulations turned out to be the genre that can be most
easily distinguished because, as mentioned, it is a hybrid genre that shares
features of the legal and tourism domains. The travel blog post and the
informative article are similar genres, but they are also distinguishable.
Actually, although these two genres share target reader and function, their
communication channel is different, which has an impact on their linguistic
features. The differences found in our research concerning lexico-
grammatical and discourse features between the two genres reinforce this
idea. In addition, the travel blog post had more dispersion among the texts,
because it is the most creative and flexible genre of those analysed, with the
most personal writing style.
9. Conclusions and future work
This article focuses on three textual genres in the tourism domain: the
informative article (about a tourist destination), the travel blog post (about a
travel experience), and the rules and regulations (for a tourist
CoMPArING TExTUAl GENrES IN SPANISh: ThE CASE oF ThE ToUrISM DoMAIN
Ibérica 42 (2021): 163-190 183
accommodation facility). Its first goal was to perform an analysis of some
linguistic features of these genres on the textual, lexico-grammatical and
discourse levels, in order to gain an in-depth understanding of them. For its
second goal, a statistical comparison among genres was carried out to prove
that some specific linguistic features are prototypical of each one, according
to the assumptions set out in Section 4, using a corpus-based methodology.
our corpus contained 60 sample texts in Spanish from these genres.
This study makes two major contributions. First, we provide a new corpus
with a linguistic characterisation of the three aforementioned genres. We also
elaborate the most frequent model structures utilised in these genres. These
model structures include the sections, titles and moves that appear regularly
in each one. In addition, the study offers quantitative information about their
textual, lexico-grammatical and discourse features. We analyse
morphosyntactic features including verbs in the active and passive voice,
verbs in the first person singular and plural, and lexical units indicating
subjectivity. We also consider discourse features such as sentences, discourse
segments, and discourse connectors.
Second, this article provides a statistical design that has allowed us to test our
hypothesis: the genres under discussion are different from each other,
considering the textual, lexico-grammatical and discourse features proposed
here. The corpus size seems to be suitable for texts statistical processing,
taking into account the fact that significant statistical differences emerged
from the corpus analysis.
our current research is related to the design of an automatic tool to help to
write tourism-related texts, bearing in mind the analysis included in this
article. This tool, named arText, is available online and free of charge at:
http://sistema-artext.com/. In the future, this tool could be implemented in
different languages, such as English.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by a research project that received a Beca
leonardo 2015 from the Fundación BBVA (IN[15]_hMS_lIN_0371), by a
research project funded by the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación e
Universidades at the call Proyectos I+D del Subprograma Estatal de
Generación de Conocimiento 2018 (PGC2018-099694-A-I00), and by a
ramón y Cajal contract (rYC-2014-16935), all of them associated with the
IrIA DA CUNhA, M. AMor MoNTANé, BEATrIz FISAS & M. ÁNGElES ESCoBAr
Ibérica 42 (2021): 163-190184
Department of Foreign Philologies and their linguistics at Universidad
Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) in Spain. This research was
developed in the framework of the ACTUAling and IUlATErM research
groups. We would like to thank Josh Goldsmith for the translation of the
text, and Sheila Queralt for the statistical advice.
Article history:
Received 25 June 2020
Received in revised form 31 March 2021
Accepted 27 June 2021
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Iria da Cunha holds a PhD in language Sciences and Applied linguistics
(Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 2008). She is an Associate Professor at the
Department of Foreign Philologies and their linguistics at the Universidad
Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED, Spain). She is a member of the
ACTUAlING and IUlATErM research groups. her main research lines are
Specialized Discourse, Terminology and Natural language Processing.
M. Amor Montané holds a PhD in language Sciences and Applied
linguistics (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 2012). She is a Serra húnter Fellow at
Universitat de Barcelona. She is a member of the IUlATErM research group at
Institut de Lingüística Aplicada of Universitat Pompeu Fabra. her main research
lines are Terminology, Specialized Discourse and Neology.
Beatriz Fisas has a BA in linguistics with honors by the Universitat de Barcelona.
She is a member of the Natural language Processing research Group (TAlN)
at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. her main research lines are Applied linguistics,
Natural language Processing, Specialized Discourse and Corpus linguistics.
M. Ángeles Escobar holds a PhD in linguistics (University of Utrecht,
1995). She is an Associate Professor at the Department of Foreign
Philologies and their linguistics at the Universidad Nacional de Educación a
Distancia (UNED, Spain). She is a member of the ACTUAlING research group.
her main research lines are Contrastive Grammar (English/Spanish),
Second language Acquisition and Psycholinguistics.
NOTES
1 All the moves were validated by the authors of this article.
2 See rST website to obtain the definitions of these relations:
[22/06/20].
3 [22/06/20].
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4 This method is frequently used in corpus linguistics, for example, in the British National Corpus and the
Corpus of Contemporary American English (Molina & Sierra, 2015).
5 literal English translations of the Spanish model structures are included in this article. We are aware
that sections, titles and moves for the same textual genres may differ in English, and that a textual analysis
of an English corpus would be necessary to linguistically characterise texts written in this language.
6 The parametric variables of the study are “Nº of moves”, “Nº of subjective units”, “Nº of verbs in the
passive voice”, “Nº of sentences”, “total Nº of connectors”, “Nº of connectors expressing Condition”
and “Nº of connectors expressing Purpose”.
7 The non-parametric variables are “Nº of sections”, “Nº of titles”, “Nº of verbs in the active voice”,
“Nº of verbs in the first person singular”, “Nº of verbs in the first person plural”, “Nº of discourse
segments”, “Nº of connectors expressing Antithesis”, “Nº of connectors expressing Cause”, “Nº of
connectors expressing Contrast”, “Nº of connectors expressing Concession” and “Nº of connectors
expressing restatement”.
Appendix 1. Categories corresponding to the linguistic
features analysed in this work.
IrIA DA CUNhA, M. AMor MoNTANé, BEATrIz FISAS & M. ÁNGElES ESCoBAr
Ibérica 42 (2021): 163-190188
DOMAIN: Textual genre Text 1: [Text name]
Textual level Number (Nº) Extracted data from texts
Nº of sections Name of section 1
Name of section 2
Name of section n
Nº of titles Title 1
Title 2
Title n
Nº of moves Move 1
Move 2
Move n
Lexical level Number (Nº)
Nº of subjective units
Nº of verbs in the active voice
Nº of verbs in the passive voice
Nº of verbs in the first person singular
Nº of verbs in the first person plural
Discourse level Number (Nº)
Nº of sentences
Nº of discourse segments
Total Nº of connectors
Nº of connectors expressing Antithesis
Nº of connectors expressing Cause
Nº of connectors expressing Concession
Nº of connectors expressing Condition
Nº of connectors expressing Contrast
Nº of connectors expressing Purpose
Nº of connectors expressing Restatement
Nº of connectors expressing Summary
Appendix 2. Model structure for the genre “informative
article”.
Appendix 3. Model structure for the genre “travel blog
post”.
CoMPArING TExTUAl GENrES IN SPANISh: ThE CASE oF ThE ToUrISM DoMAIN
Ibérica 42 (2021): 163-190 189
Sections Titles Moves
Heading No title provided Title
Author
Introduction No title provided Why you should visit
Body No title provided Photos
Photo caption
Description, list or recommendation of tourist attractions
Most noteworthy features of selected tourist attractions
Suggested itinerary or itineraries
References to historical events
References to noteworthy figures connected to the place
and/or to a tourist attraction
Suggested activities
Awards or prizes won by tourist attractions
Appendix A Practical Guide Links to websites with information about
accommodations, facilities, and transportation
Sections Titles Moves
Heading No title provided Title
Introduction No title provided Photo
Photo caption
Blogger’s thoughts (reason for writing)
Links to websites
Body No title provided Graphics: photos, photo gallery, videos and/or maps
Graphic caption
Description or recommendation of tourist attractions
Links to websites
Emotional reaction
Epilogue No title provided Wrap-up
Appendix 4. Model structure for the genre “rules and
regulations”.
IrIA DA CUNhA, M. AMor MoNTANé, BEATrIz FISAS & M. ÁNGElES ESCoBAr
Ibérica 42 (2021): 163-190190
Sections Titles Moves
Heading No title provided Main document title
Legal framework Article [Nº] Information about the applicable legal provisions
[Nº].
Bookings Article [Nº] Facility booking information
[Nº].
Pricing Article [Nº] Room pricing information
[Nº].
Payment Article [Nº] Payment information
[Nº].
Cancellation policy Article [Nº] Cancellation information
[Nº].
Check-in Article [Nº] Check-in information
[Nº].
Check-in and check-out times Article [Nº] Information about check-in and check-out times
[Nº].
Length of stay Article [Nº] Information related to length of stay
[Nº].
Rooms Article [Nº] Information about rooms
[Nº].
Hours Article [Nº] Information about hours
[Nº].
Additional services Article [Nº] Information about additional services
[Nº].
Customer rules and responsibilities Article [Nº] Information about customer rules and responsibilities
[Nº].
Pets Article [Nº] Pets policy
[Nº].
Premises liability Article [Nº] Premises liability information
[Nº].
Complaints Article [Nº] Information about complaints
[Nº].
Right to refuse admission Article [Nº] Information about the right to refuse admission
[Nº].