Contrastive linguistic study of websites promoting cheese

Abstract

The promotion and selling of products online has become a new trend, so the websites need to be up-to-date and offer detailed information on their products. The corpus of texts was compiled from websites that sell traditional dairy products, especially cheese from three different countries: Romania (Covalact, Tudia), Italy (Granarolo, Agriform, Zanetti, Galbani) and the United Kingdom (Wensleydale, Neal’s Yard Dairy, The Fine Cheese Co.). For the first two countries, only the websites that had presentations in English were selected. The corpus of texts was compiled by downloading 30 texts advertising for cheese, summing up approximately 5000 running words. Wordsmith Tools 6.0 was used to wordlist the adjectives. The study revealed that there are some basic adjectives that can be found in all three corpuses of texts; the differences come from the variety of cheese commercialized (fresh or aged), tradition in cheese making (centuries old or brand new), types of cheese (soft or hard) and the property of words.