Evaluative phraseologies in travel journalism: a look at The Guardian travel section

This paper explores some evaluative phraseologies in a 4- million-word corpus of travelogues from the British newspaper The Guardian. Through the novel technique of sem-gram, by means of which concatenations of Part-of-Speech and semantic tags were automatically retrieved from the corpus, a series of evaluative phraseologies, i.e. recurrent multi-word expressions of authorial opinion, were identified and further categorized as focusing on the travel experience, the writer or the addressee. All instances of the most frequent in each category were then studied in their co-texts to shed light on some typical discursive practices operating in the register of travel journalism.