Students are expected to have achieved a B2 level of English (CEFR) and to possess a sound knowledge of English grammar and vocabulary, together with the reading comprehension skills necessary to engage with academic texts in English. Familiarity with basic concepts in English linguistics and discourse analysis is recommended. Students should also be able to participate actively in classroom discussions and analyse authentic English-language texts.

The course introduces the principles and methods of Corpus Linguistics and corpus-assisted discourse analysis, with particular attention to their application to promotional language. Students learn how to design and compile specialised corpora, formulate corpus-based research questions, and investigate authentic language through frequency, keyword, concordance, collocation and phraseological analysis. Further attention is devoted to colligation, semantic preference, semantic prosody and the interpretation of quantitative findings through qualitative analysis.

The course examines the linguistic and discursive construction of promotion across genres, platforms and cultural contexts. Topics include evaluation and stance, metadiscourse, audience engagement, identity and expertise, community building, persuasion, cultural representation, and translation and localisation. Case studies draw on tourism communication, destination branding, winery promotion, environmental communication and social-media discourse.

Particular attention is devoted to the structure of Instagram captions. Students examine the optional sequence Hook, Building Interest and Ending; distinguish among announcement, recommendation, experiential, identity, curiosity and community hooks; and analyse strategies of progressive disclosure, emotional engagement, audience projection, calls to action, questions, invitations and community building. These elements are related to five broader communicative functions: structuring the message, engaging the audience, expressing evaluation and stance, constructing identity and expertise, and creating community.

The course also introduces the concept of narrative resources in social-media promotion. Students investigate how characterisation, experiential immersion and temporality contribute to the construction of destinations as social actors, experiential environments and temporally layered worlds. Italian and British destination communication is used to explore how similar linguistic resources may be configured differently across cultural and promotional contexts. The course concludes by considering human and AI-generated promotional texts, with particular attention to authenticity, credibility, creativity and cultural specificity.

By the end of the course, students will be able to:

Knowledge and understanding
Demonstrate knowledge of the principal concepts and methods of Corpus Linguistics and corpus-assisted discourse analysis, including corpus design, frequency, keywords, concordances, collocation, phraseology, semantic preference and semantic prosody. Demonstrate understanding of the linguistic, discursive, cultural and narrative resources used in promotional communication across genres and platforms.

Applying knowledge and understanding
Use corpus-analysis software to compile and investigate a small specialised corpus. Apply quantitative and qualitative methods to the analysis of promotional texts, identifying recurrent patterns, communicative moves, evaluative and persuasive strategies, audience-engagement resources and forms of narrative construction.

Making judgements
Critically evaluate corpus evidence and distinguish quantitative patterns from their possible discourse interpretations. Assess the methodological limitations of corpus design and analysis, and evaluate how language choices shape representations, identities, cultural meanings and relationships with audiences.

Communication skills
Use appropriate English linguistic and corpus-analytical terminology to present research questions, methods, findings and interpretations clearly and effectively in written and oral form. Support analytical claims with relevant quantitative data and textual evidence.

Learning skills
Independently formulate a research question, compile and document a small specialised corpus, select appropriate analytical procedures, critically engage with academic literature, and apply corpus-assisted methods to new promotional genres and communicative contexts.

More specifically, students will develop the ability to:

1. use English at C1+ CEFR level in academic and professional contexts;
2. recognise and analyse promotional genres, discourse patterns and communicative moves;
3. design, compile and document a small specialised corpus;
4. use frequency lists, keywords, concordances and collocations to investigate authentic language;
5. integrate quantitative findings with qualitative discourse analysis;
6. analyse the structure of Instagram captions and the linguistic resources used to attract attention, maintain interest and encourage participation;
7. identify evaluative, interpersonal, cultural and narrative resources in promotional communication;
8. compare promotional discourse across genres, platforms, languages and cultures;
9. write a coherent corpus-assisted research paper in academic English;
10. present research findings effectively to both specialist and non-specialist audiences.

The course is organised into two complementary components: lectures delivered by the course instructor, focusing on the theoretical aspects of the syllabus, and language practice sessions conducted by the Language Expert (Collaboratrice ed Esperta Linguistica), Dr Teresa Carchedi, aimed at developing students' linguistic and communicative competence.

1a. GET tests passive understanding of English grammar at C1 level ). Validity: 24 months.

1b. Written work on practical examples of heritage promotion.

2. Oral exams with questions about the topics covered during the lectures

See the section 'News' (Notizie) available on this website

The course introduces students to the theoretical principles and analytical methods of Corpus Linguistics, with particular attention to the investigation of promotional language. It examines the distinction between corpus-based and corpus-driven approaches and introduces different types of corpora, including general, reference, specialised, comparable and bilingual corpora. Students learn how research questions influence corpus design and consider issues of sampling, representativeness, balance, comparability, metadata and research ethics.

A practical component develops students’ ability to compile, prepare and document small specialised corpora. Students are introduced to corpus-analysis software and learn to generate and interpret word-frequency lists, keyword lists, concordances and collocations. Further analytical concepts include frequency distribution, normalised frequency, keyness, effect size, span, colligation, phraseology, lexical bundles, semantic preference and semantic prosody. Particular emphasis is placed on the relationship between quantitative and qualitative analysis and on the need to avoid treating frequency or statistical significance as self-explanatory evidence of discourse function.

The course subsequently applies corpus methods to the study of promotional discourse. Promotion is examined as a communicative practice that combines information, persuasion, evaluation and audience engagement. Students investigate how promotional texts construct products, places, experiences, identities and relationships with prospective audiences. Topics include evaluative language, stance, metadiscourse, direct address, imperatives, questions, calls to action, identity and expertise, community building and the linguistic construction of authenticity. The course also considers the relationship between promotional language and cultural context, drawing on approaches to intercultural communication and translation in order to examine cultural representation, functional equivalence and localisation.

Case studies are drawn from several promotional domains, including tourism communication, destination branding, winery promotion, environmental communication and social-media discourse. Comparisons between Italian and English-language promotional texts illustrate how apparently similar linguistic resources may perform different cultural and communicative functions. Students are encouraged to examine both similarities and differences without treating cultural tendencies as fixed or categorical oppositions.

A substantial section of the course focuses on the language and organisation of Instagram captions. Posts are analysed as interactional texts designed to attract attention, maintain interest, encourage participation and build relationships. Students are introduced to the optional structural sequence Hook, Building Interest and Ending. The Hook is examined in relation to its dominant communicative intention, with particular attention to announcement, recommendation, experiential, identity, curiosity and community hooks. These categories are treated as prototypes rather than rigid or mutually exclusive classifications.

The Building Interest stage is analysed through three principal strategies: progressive disclosure of information, the construction of emotional engagement and the projection of the audience into an imagined experience. Students also investigate how captions end through calls to action, questions, invitations and community-building resources. The structural analysis is related to five broader communicative functions: structuring the message, engaging the audience, expressing evaluation and stance, constructing identity and expertise, and creating community. Corpus data from Instagram pages devoted to travel, music, cinema and video games are used to examine how these communicative functions are realised across different discourse communities.

The course then investigates narrative resources in social-media promotion. Rather than assuming that all promotional posts contain complete stories, it examines how limited or distributed forms of narrativity may emerge through recurrent linguistic and discursive resources. Three interconnected dimensions are considered: characterisation, through which places and other entities acquire agency, human qualities or social roles; experiential immersion, through which readers are positioned as imagined participants and perceiving bodies within an experience; and temporality, through which places are associated with idealised pasts, suspended or alternative presents, future visits and hybrid temporal configurations.

These categories are applied to English-language Instagram posts published by Italian and British destination organisations. The comparison illustrates how the same broad repertoire of promotional and narrative resources can be configured differently: for example, by foregrounding destination identity, cultural meaning, visitor trajectories, emotional restoration or projected participation. Students critically examine the relationship between individual linguistic features and broader discourse interpretations, distinguishing the presence of isolated forms from the construction of coherent communicative or narrative configurations.

The final part of the course considers emerging developments in promotional communication, including the use of generative artificial intelligence. Human and AI-generated promotional texts are compared in relation to linguistic patterning, cultural specificity, authenticity, credibility and creativity. Students reflect on the methodological opportunities and limitations of corpus-assisted analysis in the investigation of rapidly evolving digital genres.

Throughout the course, theoretical discussion is combined with guided corpus activities and the analysis of authentic promotional texts. Students progressively develop an individual corpus-assisted research project in which they formulate a research question, compile and document a small specialised corpus, select appropriate quantitative and qualitative methods, interpret their findings and present the results in written and oral form.

Practical language activities carried out during the lettorato complement these topics by developing students' analytical and communicative skills.

Material and hand-outs will be available on the e-learning platform formazione.unisalento.it. Ask the lecturer for the course key