Persuasive adjetives used in sundbonoo's and civitatis' websites to promote leisure activities in Mallorca

Abstract

[eng] People are attracted and convinced to buy something on the Internet because of what they read and what it conveys for them. In this dissertation we will analyse eight leisure excursions, four from the Sunbonoo online tourist website and four from Civitatis while paying special attention to the promotional language used. More particularly, the focus of this study will be on the persuasive/hyperbolic adjectives used by both websites to promote leisure activities in Mallorca. From the general results obtained, we can conclude that Sunbonoo doubles Civitatis in the total number of adjectives found and Sunbonoo is also more extensive and richer in terms of persuasive adjectives. We divided all the persuasive adjectives found in both websites into 10 categories and found that the predominant ones are the appearance/positive feeling and the type/condition type of adjectives. On the other hand, fewer adjectives expressing transparency, touch, size, shape, state, colour and location were encountered. In addition, the most productive nouns preceded by different persuasive adjectives to highlight, exaggerate and hyperbolise their qualities are those referring to Mallorca’s different types of landscapes (for example, beautiful “beach(es)”, turquoise-blue “bays”, transparent “waters”, incredible “views” or paradisiacal “island”).