English for tourism: On the use of adjectives in texts written by (EFL) novice writers and by (non-)native professionals

This paper explores the use of adjectives in a corpus of tourism texts written by Italian learners of English. Three reference corpora are compared to the learner corpus: one consisting of texts written by native professionals, one by non-native professionals and one by native novice writers. The investigation focuses first on the frequency of types and tokens of the adjectives in the corpora and on their ‘sophistication’. Subsequently, it investigates some aspects of the use of (un)hyphenated adjectival compounds, of inaccurately formed adjectives and of infrequent ones. The findings reveal that the learners tend to be less creative than the other groups and that adjective compounding and derivation can be problematic in various respects. The paper claims that the results could inform the preparation of specific data-driven teaching materials and that the methodology used for this study could be followed to explore other lexico-grammatical aspects of tourism writing.