Persuasion is always at work in language, even if it is especially prominent in genres where the directive function of language is key. This is highlighted in the definition of persuasion as “those linguistic choices that aim at changing or affecting the behavior of others or strengthening the existing beliefs and behaviors of those who already agree” (Virtanen & Halmari, 2005). Contemporary studies of persuasion tend to centre on domains in the public sphere such as advertising, politics and media discourse. In our talk, we focus on tourism discourse.
The complete English-version material from Sweden’s official tourism website (www.visitsweden.com), whose mission is to market Sweden as a tourist destination, is analysed qualitatively and quantitatively. All verbal text (excluding images) from the 2019 version was compiled into a specialised corpus, comprising 53,296 words and 2,673 sentences. A frequency word lists generated through Sketch Engine showed that second-person you was highly frequent, ranked #9 after function words such as the, and and of. Based on frequent 2-4-word n-grams, it was also observed that you was commonly included in larger patterns. This justified the decision to use all examples involving you as a basis for the study, where tourism discourse is considered from the perspective of audience orientation, with a special focus on extended patterns that serve a persuasive function. While you has been studied in tourism research, it has not been in focus and observations regarding patterns you is involved in have been limited to collocations. As previous work has not considered the wider rhetorical patterns of you, our research will contribute to a broader perspective.
In the qualitative analysis, three coders participated in an inductive process of identifying persuasive rhetorical functions in a concordance list of 456 unique examples of you (with duplicates removed). The findings show that the you examples cover a scale from relatively informational to highly persuasive. This is in line with previous research having observed that tourism discourse generally serves both an informational and a persuasive function (e.g. Bosnar-Valkovic & Jurin, 2019; Calvi, 2010; Malekina & Ivanov, 2018). The majority of the you examples are clearly or even highly persuasive and can be divided into categories based on their rhetorical function: Building the writer-reader relationship; Anticipating reader reactions; Imagining scenarios; Presenting options; Offering tourist identities; Presenting tourist values; and Presenting a welcoming destination. Many of the examples serve more than one of these functions, as illustrated in the title. Quantitative findings on how the rhetorical functions are distributed will be presented in the talk.
There are two distinct speaker roles involved in the material: the “guide” (who is also the writer) and the potential “visitor” (the reader). Their relationship is asymmetrical from the perspective of knowledge about the destination, but the guide does not have the power to direct the audience (unlike e.g. a teacher in an educational context), so the potential visitor needs to be persuaded to follow the advice of the guide. As persuasion is clearly linked both to the discourse type—tourism discourse—and the discourse feature—you and associated patterns—in this study, we may expect to find the essence of persuasion at this intersection.
Oviedo, 2023.