Sleep well in Småland, whether you prefer a castle or a hut: Performing persuasion through patterns of you in tourism discourse

Abstract

Persuasion is especially prominent in genres with a strong aim to affect others’ behaviour. Contemporary persuasion studies often centre on domains such as advertising, politics and media, and the present study targets tourism. Previous work on persuasion in tourism discourse has focused on word choice and collocations, while this study addresses how persuasion is performed through broader rhetorical functions. The English version of the official tourism website for Sweden was compiled into a 53,296-word corpus. Word frequency data showed that you was highly frequent. All examples involving you (N=450) were analysed inductively to identify persuasive rhetorical functions. Seven functions emerged: Specifying tourist identities; Constructing helpful/expert guide; Building rapport; Anticipating reader reactions (focusing on the visitor and/or guide); and Personifying the destination; Presenting options; Imagining scenarios (focusing on the destination). The most frequent function was found to be Constructing helpful/expert guide, whose frequency contrasts sharply to Anticipating reader reactions and Personifying the destination, with the remaining functions falling in between. The frequency analysis details how the seven functions co-occur; it revealed a common pattern of overlapping functions.