Affective, thematic and linguistic qualities of tourism slogans

Purpose Perusing an Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW) database that contains nearly 14,000 English lemmas, this paper calculated valence, arousal and dominance scores for 186 countries/territories tourism slogans and used them to identify three clusters. On average, tourism slogan has 3.84 words, with content word and affective word ratio of 0.82 and 0.50, respectively. It was also found that tourism slogans, on average, have statistically significantly higher valence (pleasure) and dominance (empowerment) scores than the ANEW database. The top thematic patterns identified from tourism slogans are “action verbs”, “positive emotions” and “nature”. The most prominent linguistic features are “pronouns”, “sound device”, “figurative language”, “imperative” and “personification”. Perusing the Nature Earth Database, a world map of geographical distribution based on three clusters of tourism slogans was created. Combined with circular dendrogram, this tourism slogan map visualizes the potential strategic alliance among destinations with similar affective qualities for their tourism slogans. Theoretically, this paper applied ANEW database to make it possible including affect in studies of tourism slogans semantics, turning usually qualitative content analysis into multivariate data analysis such as cluster analysis. Pragmatically, it helps to understand the thematic patterns and linguistic features of tourism slogans. These findings may serve as general guidelines in creating tourism slogans. Pedagogically, two user interfaces were customarily developed with the assistance of chatbots to meet the needs of tourism slogans analysis. This paper demonstrates that, with basic coding skills and prompt guidance, researchers can now design their own research tools.