‘Luxurious’ metaphors in luxury hotel websites in Singapore and Hong Kong: A mixed-methods study

Abstract

Previous research has yielded a substantial body of empirical evidence regarding the use of metaphors in various types of discourse. However, limited research exists on the relationship between metaphor and more segmented economic industries, such as the luxury hospitality sector. The attention of this article is directed towards inspecting how metaphorical expressions are deployed by luxury hotels to construct their luxury identity and attract potential guests.

A corpus of 62 lxury hotel websites from Singapore and Hong Kong is used as the contextual background for the investigation of metaphor usage in this study. Using MIPVU (Metaphor Identification Procedure VU University Amsterdam), a total of 6990 metaphorical keywords, including a diverse range of 28 source domains were observed. Among others, the five most productive source domains in the corpus are living organism, physical object, space, artifact, and motion. A mixed-methods approach that combines both quantitative data analytics and qualitative discourse analysis reveals and interprets significant associations between source domains, hotel facilities, and regions, suggesting that the choice of metaphorical expressions is not arbitrary but is influenced by specific factors related to the hotel's offerings and cultures. This study emphasises that the analysis of lexical-conceptual patterns in promotional texts can generate deeper insights into positioning strategies.