Appraisal patterns used on the kalimantan tourism website: An ecolinguistics perspective

The issue of ecology in the tourism sector has received considerable critical attention. Despite the persuasive strategies in tourism that dominate the academic discussion, this paper takes a different viewpoint by investigating linguistic strategies that evaluate a tourism website from an ecolinguistic viewpoint. Hence, the major objective of this paper is to investigate the ideology underlying the appraisal patterns contained in the Kalimantan tourism texts from an ecolinguistic perspective. Data for this research were collected from the Kalimantan official tourism website, analysing its keywords by AntConc 4.0, which were examined qualitatively from its concordance lines. Quantitative and qualitative data were used to obtain the appraisal patterns framework as the guidelines. The findings demonstrate that appraisal patterns are manifested through attitude and graduation systems that constitute positive feelings of the readers’ happiness and satisfaction due to the quality and quantity of the Kalimantan environment. Therefore, the ideology reflected in the appraisal patterns is the marketization of natural richness and endangerment. The analysis concludes that the purr-words exploited in tourism promotion articulate an ambivalent discourse. The website promotes natural richness to raise people’s awareness of Kalimantan’s role as the world’s lungs, but at the same time, it also encourages the objectification and commodification of nature in the tourism sector. This work contributes to ecolinguistics by investigating non-ecological data.