Serving suggestions in English and Spanish

Globalization in trade and industry has led to the need for writing specialized texts in English as a lingua franca in all domains. Non-native speakers often find difficulties in the production of specialized texts, including online promotional discourse. In the food industry, the description of manufactured products is often followed by serving suggestions written in an attempt to appeal to the consumer/buyer and make them visualize different ways in which they can present the product. Because of the importance of this key section for marketing purposes, we have analyzed the language employed in serving suggestions. The main pragmatic functions found are instruction and persuasion, and this paper explores the expression of these functions cross-linguistically in English and Spanish texts promoting the consumption of cheese. The empirical data have been extracted from a comparable corpus of cheese descriptions in the two languages, which has been rhetorically tagged to isolate the move of serving suggestions. The main findings have revealed that, in both languages, the instructive function tends to be conveyed through syntactic structures, whereas the persuasive function is mainly expressed through phraseological patterns and specific lexical units with positive connotations. This paper contributes to the international expansion of local companies providing an inventory of linguistic resources for the successful writing of promotional texts in a foreign language. The results are also useful in translation and foreign language writing, both for professionals and students, especially in the field of marketing.