Is persuasive, evaluative discourse fading away? A focus on change and tradition in the promotional, persuasive discourse around Mediterranean destinations.

The Mediterranean resources in terms of heritage, tradition, history, natural environment, proximity of points of interest, and available leisure activities are constantly evaluated in texts related to tourism promotion according to targeted potential customers. The research question that this presentation tries to answer is twofold. The general question is about how persuasive discourse related to Mediterranean tourism and travel could be seen and perceived as obsolete despite its poetic, captivating style. An answer could be that it is because persuasive, evaluative appraisals have declined in frequency of use in recent years in English. I believe that this generalized decline is obviously replaced by other evaluative forms and formats that are more effective as persuasive tools with a younger segment. Promotional discourse, particularly on social media and sometimes on brand websites, deploys a hybrid mixture of traditional persuasive texts and strategies and new ones based on platform affordances. The result is a seemingly more transparent, more authentic persuasive discourse. I will give examples and analyse the most recent development of persuasive aspects of promotional discourse. The comparison will be between traditional promotional discourse, which is not disappearing, and a discourse that reflects the nature of the diachronic phenomenon known as the democratization of the English language. The approaches and methodologies used are based on functional linguistics. Specifically, the appraisal system (Martin and White 2005), the study of genre, register, and style (Biber 2019), the diachronic studies on the democratization of the English language, and the tools offered by the Corpus of Contemporary American English. The material is a corpus of promotional, persuasive descriptions of places, destinations, and resources of the Mediterranean destinations and the corpus of registers available in the COCA corpus.