Abstract

Activities related to olive oil tourism, also known as oleotourism, are continuously growing in Europe especially in the Mediterranean area. This study aims to investigate the semantic behavior of a verb and the syntactic realization of its arguments in online digital texts that promote the knowledge of the olive oil production, as well as its link with local culture, territory and traditions. The attention is focused on lexicon and syntactic constructions that not only describe and inform, but establish a direct connection with the readers by capturing their interest and persuading them through the human senses (touch, sight, hearing, smell and taste). The data are collected from specialized web sites to compile a corpus of Italian tourist texts. The theoretical-methodological approach adopted for data analysis is based on Fillmore’s Frame Semantics (1985) and the English FrameNet annotation procedure (Kilgarriff et al., 2004). The results of the analysis highlight semantic and pragmatic phenomena characterizing the language of tourism, such as metaphorical verb constructions.