Exploring the Language of Adventure Tourism

Introduction

Adventure tourism is gaining importance in the tourism sector at present, since more and more people are becoming involved in sport, nature, and sustainability, and they are continuously looking for the active instead of the traditional holiday, like the well-known sun and beach tourism. Although passive activities related to traditional tourism still occupy a significant position in the global tourism economy, we are witnessing the widespread popularity of a range of alternative tourisms, such as the one with which we are concerned in this work, that is, adventure tourism.

This type of tourism offers numerous activities, from hiking to climbing or scuba diving, all of which take place in nature with different levels of difficulty and require an active involvement of tourists. In the same line, the language employed in this type of tourism is dynamic, full of motion and descriptions, and seeks to attract potential tourists by offering appealing adventure activities and natural spots. In the last years several works have been published that provide valuable insights into different linguistic, semantic, and pragmatic characteristics of this language (cf. Durán-Muñoz, 2014, 2019, 2021, 2022, 2024; Durán-Muñoz & Jiménez-Navarro, 2021, 2023; Durán-Muñoz & L’Homme, 2020; Jiménez-Navarro & Durán-Muñoz, 2024); however, there is still a gap in the literature with regard to a comprehensive description of its features.

The chapters selected for this volume give a detailed account of the language of adventure tourism and contribute to exploring this specialised domain from a linguistic, a semantic, and a pragmatic viewpoint. It includes 10 chapters dealing with different languages (Spanish, English, and Italian), either with a monolingual or a bilingual approach, and revolving around verbal units (Chapters 1, 5, and 9), adjectives (Chapter 3), phraseology (Chapter 6), compounding (Chapter 10), pragmatics (Chapter 8), and accessibility (Chapter 2). Moreover, the studies are corpus-based or corpus-driven – most of them employ the Advencor corpus¹ – and implement different methodologies, from lexico-semantic approaches (Chapters 1, 3, 5, 6, and 7) to natural language processing (Chapter 4). These enhance the understanding of current terminology and techniques.

In this context, the contributions gathered here conduct a substantially complete analysis of the main linguistic, semantic, and pragmatic features of the specialised language of adventure tourism, an ever-growing tourism subdomain, as well as a very up-to-date approach to corpus-assisted terminology studies. A brief description of them is provided next.

Chapter 1, by Míriam Buendía-Castro (“Lexical domains in the field of adventure tourism”), deals with verbal units. The author analyses the most representative 50 verbs in the Advencor corpus and classifies them into domains and subdomains according to the Lexical Grammar Model (Faber & Mairal, 1999), which helps to acquire knowledge of this segment. Finally, she proposes a description of the subdomain to feel sth good, within the domain EMOTION, and proves that verbs belonging to the same subdomain exhibit similar semantic and syntactic behaviours.

Gloria Cappelli, in Chapter 2 (“The language of accessible adventure tourism”), presents the results of a qualitative, corpus-based analysis of the lexical features of accessible adventure tourism promotion. Her study is innovative and offers a novel approach to this field. She points out that this type of specialised discourse shows different characteristics with respect to both the discourse of general tourism and that of adventure tourism in terms of terminology and collocations. Additionally, she emphasises that much still needs to be done to ensure true inclusiveness in tourism discourse.

In Chapter 3 (“Descriptive adjectives in adventure tourism: A corpus-assisted English-Spanish contrastive study”), Isabel Durán-Muñoz and Paula Prieto Mayo present a corpus-assisted analysis of descriptive adjectives in the language of adventure tourism in both English and Spanish. These specialised units are analysed according to their meaning as either descriptive or evaluative, and grouped into a set of semantic categories established ad hoc for this research. Finally, differences and similarities between the two working languages are examined, and some relevant conclusions are drawn from the results.

Patrick Goethals and Jasper Degraeuwe offer a new approach to the language of adventure tourism in Chapter 4 (“Methodological advances in lexical pattern extraction: Examples from Spanish adventure tourism”). The authors describe several techniques (e.g., dependency parsing and semantic similarity calculation based on non-contextual word embeddings and transformer-based language models) in order to prove how these recent innovations can contribute to a more fruitful use of mid-size corpora, such as the Advencor corpus, in the domain under study and, therefore, improve extraction results to feed terminological resources like the DicoAdventure dictionary.²

Eduardo José Jacinto García, in Chapter 5 (“The argument structure of motion verbs in Spanish: A methodological proposal applied to DicoAdventure”), provides a thorough analysis and a classification of motion verbs in Spanish combining two different approaches: on the one hand, the Explanatory Combinatorial Lexicology (Mel’čuk et al., 1995; Melčuk & Milićević, 2020) and, on the other, Frame Semantics (Fillmore, 1976, 1982; Fillmore & Baker, 2010). According to the arguments of the analysed verbs, the author classifies them into verbs of displacement and verbs of manner of movement (Morimoto, 2001).

For her part, Eva Lucía Jiménez-Navarro focuses on the phraseological component of the language of adventure tourism in Chapter 6 (“Prepositional phrase collocations of motion verbs: A corpus-driven study in adventure tourism”). More specifically, she explores the prepositional phrases collocating with a set of motion verbs extracted from the Advencor corpus. The findings are meaningful and show that collocations describing real motion are more common than those representing fictive motion. In addition, an analysis of the semantic roles expressed by the prepositions is also undertaken and the most recurrent prepositions are studied.

Chapter 7, by Marie-Claude L’Homme (“Frame Semantics and domain-specific resources”), deals with several questions that raise during the design and development of corpus-assisted specialised resources, such as what kinds of terms should be taken into consideration or what is the linguistic behaviour of terms. In this work, answers provided by Frame Semantics (Fillmore, 1976, 1982; Fillmore & Baker, 2010) and the lexical database FrameNet (Ruppenhofer et al., 2016) are examined as well as concrete implementations in two resources, namely DicoAdventure, a resource that records terms in the field of adventure tourism, and DiCoEnviro, a resource that contains environment terms.

Elena Manca is the author of Chapter 8 (“Patterns and perspectives in the language of Italian and British walking holidays”), which contributes to the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research on adventure travel tourism by examining the discourse patterns used on websites promoting walking holidays in Italy and in the UK. This work explores the lexical, semantic, and pragmatic choices that characterise this type of discourse. Additionally, it aims to describe how authors and readers interact and how space is portrayed in relation to the participants following the theoretical models of metadiscourse (Hyland, 2005) and spatial description (Levinson, 1996; Taylor & Tversky, 1996). The results provide detailed information about the distinct features of promoting British and Italian walking holidays, which enable significant applications in the marketing domain.

Next, Macarena Palma-Gutiérrez is the author of Chapter 9 (“Syntactic alternations with verbs of motion: A corpus-driven analysis of the language of adventure tourism”). She analyses the syntactic and semantic characterisation of motion verbs, with a special focus on the structural and relational link between this type of verbs and their argument structure, as well as the syntactic alternations displayed by these verbs in the specialised domain of adventure tourism. Two subclasses of verbs of motion are examined: the subclass of “run” verbs (like hike) and the subclass of verbs that are vehicle names (like canoe). The main findings show that, although the intransitive basic or unmarked forms are frequent in the corpus examined, some verbs tend to occur more productively with other syntactically derived alternations.

Finally, Chapter 10, by Carmen Portero Muñoz (“The use of compounds in the adventure tourism lexicon”), explores the relevance of English compounding processes in the lexical repertoire of adventure tourism. Through the use of data extracted from Advencor, this study aims to identify various compound patterns related to adventure tourism activities and their relative productivity. Initially, compounds are categorised based on their syntax and, subsequently, they are examined concerning the meanings of the first word, the head noun, and the internal association between their components, known as thematic relations. The research demonstrates that compounding plays a vital morphological role in creating new words within the segment under study.

With the focus on the language of adventure tourism, the contributions included in this volume implement fresh approaches and novel methodologies that represent an asset for linguists in general (terminologists, translators, interpreters, etc.) and encourage future lines of research, either in the domain of tourism or else. All chapters included have been written by renowned authors and peer-reviewed by experts, which ensures their overall quality and their important contribution to the field. We sincerely hope that this edited book becomes a valuable source of information for scholars, trainees, and professionals. Our ultimate goal is to raise awareness of the importance of analysing a specialised language (in this case, the language of adventure tourism) from different approaches (linguistic, semantic, and pragmatic), drawing attention to diverse grammatical categories (nouns, adjectives, verbs, etc.) so as to offer a glimpse of the need for designing and developing online specialised resources, such as DicoAdventure, and to contribute to the characterisation of this specialised discourse.

Isabel Durán-Muñoz and Eva Lucía Jiménez-Navarro