Adventure tourism discourse: A corpus- based study from a gender approach

Abstract

This research makes a valuable contribution to the examination of adventure tourism through a gender-oriented lens. Its primary goal is to shed light on the distinct gender-related facets within this specialised discourse and to pinpoint potential gender bias at both the lexical and grammatical levels. Currently, alternative tourism, such as adventure tourism, is experiencing a growing surge of interest. Traditionally, this form of tourism has been characterised by a higher participation rate among male practitioners, particularly in physically demanding activities like climbing, skydiving, or scuba diving. While previous studies have delved into gender differences in adventure activity participation primarily from a socio-economic standpoint, to the best of our knowledge none has centred on the linguistic elements inherent in this specialised discourse from a gender approach. By analysing a monolingual specialised corpus of promotional texts in English representing adventure tourism, the Advencor corpus, this chapter aims to bridge this existing gap. It seeks to dissect some of the most relevant lexical and grammatical components of this discourse that may harbour gender-related nuances, particularly by studying specific linguistic elements such as the personal and possessive pronouns she, he, his, her, and him, and their pairings (e.g., he or she, his/her, etc.), as well as the lemmatised units man and woman and keywords related to practitioners, like trekker, diver, or instructor. The findings obtained suggest that the so-called gender bias can indeed be discerned within this specialised lexicon, albeit in only a limited number of instances.