Selling cheese online

This paper is a corpus-based study of certain key nouns used in promotional texts describing cheese in English. A corpus of online cheese descriptions was compiled to extract lexical information regarding the characterization of cheese. All in all, 37 key nouns were identified and classified into 7 semantic categories: appearance, part, colour, aroma, texture, taste and quality ranking. All the occurrences of each key noun were analysed to obtain an exhaustive inventory of the phraseological patterns in which they occur. The results show both objective characteristics (size, shape and colour) and subjective features which tend to be described positively in this promotional subgenre (aroma, texture and taste). Additionally, this text type includes key nouns related to the quality ranking of the cheeses promoted. The main aim of this paper is to gain insight into one particular subgenre – promotional cheese descriptions – through the major lexical co-occurrences used to convey positive evaluation of cheeses.