The Treatment of Adjectives in Tourism Websites: A Comparative Study of the Jordanian, European and Asian Official Tourism Websites

Abstract

This study aims at examining how the lexical choice of a given discourse is determined by different factors such as the type of the discourse, the content and the medium of the message, and the ideological perspectives of the tourism persuader. More specifically, the study focuses on selecting adjectives in the Jordanian tourism official websites compared to European and Asian counterparts. The finding of the study shows that adjective lexical selection, together with their collocational behavior plays a crucial role in the tourism promotional discourse. The lexical choice of adjectives is also semantically restricted in that only limited meanings of the adjectives in the discourse are used. Accordingly, the vocabulary of the Jordanian tourism websites is characterized by the co-presence of two main types of adjectives: the descriptive adjectives, describing details about the targeted destination; and evaluative adjectives, conveying positive attitudes.