ISSN: 1579-9794
Hikma 23 (Número especial I) (2024), 1 - 22
The Language of Adventure tourism and its Key Terms in
English and Spanish
El lenguaje del turismo de aventura y sus términos clave
en inglés y español
ISABEL DURÁN-MUÑOZ
iduran@uco.es
Universidad de Córdoba
EVA LUCÍA JIMÉNEZ-NAVARRO
lucia.jimenez@uco.es
Universidad de Córdoba
Fecha de recepción: 13/12/2023
Fecha de aceptación: 15/02/2024
Abstract: Adventure tourism is conceived as a type of alternative tourism that
moves away from typical practices, such as sun and beach or cultural tourism.
In particular, this segment implies a tourist who assumes an active role in an
adventure activity that is practised in contact with nature and where a feeling
of excitement prevails, depending on the level of risk that is experienced. For
this reason, the keywords defining this specialised discourse are adventure,
nature, and risk. Taking this into consideration, the current paper hypothesises
that these key terms are used in a similar way in different languages.
Therefore, it aims to analyse these terms and their phraseology in English
along with their Spanish counterparts (i.e., “aventura”, naturaleza, and
riesgo) in a specialised corpus that covers the domain under study. To do
so, the corpus-based methodology applied will be divided into four steps: (1)
the compilation of the comparable (English-Spanish) corpus, (2) the search
for the keywords, (3) a quantitative analysis based on the frequency of use of
these keywords in every language, and (4) a qualitative analysis in terms of
the phraseological combinations of the keywords in English and Spanish.
Additionally, their adjectival derivatives in the two working languages will be
examined. The findings show that the terms selected are more frequent in
Spanish than in English, although they behave quite similarly when it comes
to their phraseological study and use in context.
Keywords: Adventure tourism, Keyword, Qualitative analysis, Quantitative
analysis, Specialised corpus
2 The language of adventure tourism and its key terms in English and Spanish
Hikma 23 (Número especial I) (2024), 1 - 22
Resumen: El turismo de aventura se concibe como un tipo de turismo
alternativo que escapa de otras prácticas comunes, como son el turismo de
sol y playa o el turismo cultural. En particular, este ámbito implica la
participación de un turista que asume un papel activo en una actividad de
aventura en contacto con la naturaleza y donde prevalece un sentimiento de
emoción dependiente del nivel de riesgo que se experimenta. Por esta razón,
se podría confirmar que las palabras clave que definen a este discurso
especializado son adventure, nature y risk. En este sentido, el presente
artículo parte de la hipótesis de que estos términos clave se emplean de
manera similar en diferentes lenguas; por lo tanto, se propone su análisis en
inglés junto con sus equivalentes en español («aventura», «naturaleza» y
«riesgo») y su fraseología en un corpus especializado que abarca el dominio
de estudio. Para llevarlo a cabo, se empleará una metodología basada en
corpus dividida en cuatro pasos: 1) la compilación del corpus comparable
(inglés-español), 2) la búsqueda de las palabras clave, 3) un análisis
cuantitativo basado en la frecuencia de uso de estas palabras en cada lengua,
y 4) un análisis cualitativo en función de las combinaciones fraseológicas de
las palabras en inglés y español. Además, se examinarán los adjetivos que
derivan de estos términos en las dos lenguas de trabajo. Los resultados
muestran que los términos seleccionados son más frecuentes en español que
en inglés, aunque se comportan de manera notablemente similar en lo que
respecta a su estudio fraseológico y uso en contexto.
Palabras clave: Turismo de aventura, Palabra clave, Análisis cualitativo,
Análisis cuantitativo, Corpus especializado
INTRODUCTION
Tourism has evolved over the years to adapt to the demands of new
tourists who search for higher quality, specialised, sustainable, and flexible
tourism. In this context, there has been a segmentation of the tourism market
as a means of responding to these new needs and motivations of tourists
(cf. Llamas Arjona, 2009, p. 30) and, therefore, to bring tourism services
closer to demand and not vice versa, as was previously the case. Thus, for
example, we find traditional tourism segments, such as sun and beach, rural,
or cultural tourism, but also other alternative segments that promote
low-density tourism in natural or rural areas, with more active and specialised
activities. The types of alternative tourism that are available at present are
remarkably varied and, in fact, their boundaries are often blurred and
intermingled. Examples of alternative types of tourism are ecotourism,
adventure, nature, rural, green, or active tourism. Each of these focuses on
different aspects and offers diverse activities, but they also often cause
confusion. For example, ecotourism is defined by The International
Isabel Durán-Muñoz and Eva Lucía Jiménez-Navarro 3
Hikma 23 (Número especial I) (2024), 1 - 22
Ecotourism Society as “responsible travel to natural areas that conserves the
environment, sustains the well-being of the local people, and involves
interpretation and education” (TIES, 2023, “The Definition”), while nature
tourism refers toactividades recreativas y de esparcimiento en la naturaleza
sin degradarla” (Ministerio de Agricultura y Pesca, Alimentación y
Medioambiente, 2017, p. 2). In other words, both are sustainable types of
tourism and take place in nature, but their purpose is slightly different despite
being often used as synonyms. Something similar happens with adventure
tourism, which is the segment under study in the current paper, since it is
frequently confused with other types of alternative tourism, like nature tourism
or active tourism.
This type of tourism “is one of the most rapidly growing sectors in the
world,” according to the Global Report on Adventure Tourism (WTO, 2014,
p. 10), and consists in the practice of adventure activities such as climbing,
rafting, or canyoning, which take place in the nature with greater or lesser
intensity and risk. In this context, both from physically well-prepared to
completely unexperienced tourists can practise adventure activities adapted
to their level and their preferences. This entails from less physically
demanding activities, such as cycling or hiking, to highly demanding and risky
experiences, like bungee jumping, white-water rafting, or skydiving.
To date, no agreed definition of adventure tourism exists, although in
general most experts recognise that it entails the following features: danger,
risk, challenge, novelty, excitement, exploration, and discovery. As a way of
example, the Adventure Travel Trade Association (ATTA; 2024a) considers
that adventure tourism “contains three main components […]: 1) physical
activity, 2) a connection to nature and the environment and 3) an immersive
cultural experience (“Values Statement,par. 2). It complements this
definition by adding that “Adventure travel isn’t just about adrenaline, distance,
or physical challenge. Adventure travelers are seeking to learn about history
and culture, to immerse themselves in nature, and to engage deeply with your
destination (ATTA, 2024b, “What is Adventure Travel?”, par. 1). To
summarise, adventure tourists play an active role in these activities with a high
degree of involvement, demand a real adventure experience in nature, and
search for certain elements of risk.
Based on the main features of this type of tourism, the initial hypothesis
of this work suggests the idea that the use of the main keywords defining
adventure tourism are the same in both English and Spanish. Having said
that, the objectives of this paper are twofold: on the one hand, to carry out a
corpus-based study of the nominal keywords that define this type of tourism
according to most of the definitions found so far (cf. Section 3.2.), that is,
adventure, nature, and risk (and their adjectival forms adventurous, natural,
4 The language of adventure tourism and its key terms in English and Spanish
Hikma 23 (Número especial I) (2024), 1 - 22
and risky) and their equivalents in Spanish (i.e., aventura”, naturaleza, and
riesgo, as well as aventurero, natural, and arriesgado”/“peligroso). On
the other hand, we aim to analyse their frequency of use and combinatorial
properties in these languages. This will shed some light on the usage of these
terms in this specialised field and the main differences or similarities between
the two working languages.
In order to achieve these objectives, the paper is structured as follows:
first, the DicoAdventure Project and the resulting resource DicoAdventure are
covered in Section 1; second, an overview of the main features of the
terminology used in adventure tourism is presented in Section 2; third, the
methodology followed in this corpus-based study is described in Section 3;
then, the results obtained and their analysis are presented in Section 4, and,
finally, the conclusions of the study are provided.
1. DICOADVENTURE: THE SKELETON OF THE LANGUAGE OF ADVENTURE TOURISM
While there is a relatively wealth of work that examines the language of
tourism in general (e.g., Calvi, 2009, 2010, 2014; Calvi & Bonomi, 2008; Dann,
1996, 2007; Durán-Muñoz, 2008, 2012; Kelly, 1997, among others), there is
a dearth of studies about specific tourism segments like adventure tourism.
Fortunately, several studies have been published in the past years about the
language of this particular segment, especially in the framework of the
DicoAdventure Project (DicoAdventure, 2024).
The main goal of this project is to analyse the terminology of this
specialised language and to create a flexible and comprehensive bilingual
e-resource (English, Spanish), named DicoAdventure (DicoAdventure. Online
dictionary of adventure tourism, 2024), to facilitate the acquisition of this
specialised knowledge in a user-friendly and intuitive way. This tool is based
on the linguistic theory of Frame Semantics (Fillmore, 1976, 1982, 1985, 2006;
Fillmore & Baker, 2015), which may apparently lead to implausible
interpretation of the data unless the user is familiar with the basic tenets of
this theory. However, contrary to that thought, a few terminological resources
born in the Observatoire de Linguistique Sens-Texte (OLST, University of
Montreal, Canada) such as DiCoEnviro. Dictionnaire fondamental de
l’environnement (2024; a terminological database on the environment)set a
long-standing precedent for the birth and success of DicoAdventure.1
In fact, the abovementioned terminological resources are inspired by
FrameNet (Fillmore & Atkins, 1992; Ruppenhofer et al., 2016), which is an
ambitious project running at the International Computer Science Institute in
Berkeley, California (the United States), since 1997 and is considered the
1 For more information on the DiCoEnviro and similar resources, see L’Homme (2020).
Isabel Durán-Muñoz and Eva Lucía Jiménez-Navarro 5
Hikma 23 (Número especial I) (2024), 1 - 22
practical application of Frame Semantics. FrameNet designates an open
access database that gathers thousands of English terms and the frames that
they evoke. To explain, a frame is understood as a cognitive scenario rooted
in the speakers’ experience in such a way that the understanding of a given
frame may vary between different speakers of the same language, depending
on their personal experience of the world and background knowledge. These
frames are characterised by a set of events and a number of participants, and
exposure to a specific linguistic form in a given context activates or “evokes”
(Fillmore, 2006, p. 378) a frame in the perceiver’s mind.
FrameNet served as a source of inspiration for DicoAdventure too
because it offers a method to organise the terminology belonging to a
specialised subject field, such as adventure tourism, by providing definitions,
relations, and examples in context, and making DicoAdventure the perfect
skeleton to host this terminology. The information contained is manually
annotated, showing the frame elements that are core or non-core to a given
scenario (i.e., necessary or optional to understand the meaning of the event,
respectively). For instance, at present the resource mainly includes motion
verbs, both conveying real and fictive meaning. These terms are described
according to the frame elements involved in their meaning, more specifically,
the semantic roles detected in the scenario of an adventure activity, namely:
TOURIST, RESPONSIBLE, PLACE, DIRECTION, SOURCE, DESTINATION, PATH,
INSTRUMENT, VEHICLE_WITH_ENGINE, VEHICLE_WITHOUT_ENGINE,
SAFETY_EQUIPMENT, AND SPECIFIC_CLOTHING. An example is the verb to
ascend, defined as “A ‘Touristmoves in an upward ‘Direction along a ‘Path
from ‘Sourceto ‘Destination’” in the entry ascend1 included in the dictionary.
The reason for the existing implementation of motion verbs into
DicoAdventure is the confirmation that motion, understood as the
displacement of one entity from one place to another (either real or fictive), is
of paramount importance in the terminology of adventure tourism. By way of
illustration, Durán-Muñoz and L’Homme (2020) state that nearly half of the
verbs automatically extracted from a specialised corpus covering the
language of adventure tourism (i.e., the ADVENCOR corpus; cf. Section 3.1.)
were motion verbs, for instance, to climb, to dive, or to trek. In other words,
motion is extensively present in the specialised texts about adventure tourism
in the form of verbs but also nounssince it is a type of tourism where tourists
play an active role in the activities that they perform. Nevertheless, as shown
in Section 2, motion is not the only feature that characterises this language.
2. THE TERMINOLOGY OF ADVENTURE TOURISM
If one of the goals in this paper is to explore some of the main keywords
defining the segment of adventure tourism (in particular, adventure, nature,
6 The language of adventure tourism and its key terms in English and Spanish
Hikma 23 (Número especial I) (2024), 1 - 22
and risk, both in English and Spanish aventura, naturaleza, riesgo, as well
as their adjectival forms), it is mandatory to delve into the meaning of this
growing and valuable niche within the tremendous potential that is tourism. As
aforementioned, the core idea about this type of tourism is that it provides a
sort of alternative tourism. In other words, it offers a series of activities that
drift away from the masses and take care of the environment at the same time
as they allow for fresh ways of enjoyment in unusual, unconventional, remote,
and exotic destinations. According to the WTO (2014), adventure tourists are
passionate and risk-taking” (p. 10), so they are willing to pay extra for having
the opportunity to experience feelings of excitement, danger, novelty, and
challenge. However, not even one of these feelings would arise without the
active involvement of the tourists in the adventure activities taking place. For
these reasons, it seems comprehensible that the most frequent terms found
in the language of adventure tourism can be classified according to four
semantic categories (Durán-Muñoz, 2013, p. 260):
1. The person who organises, guides, or practises an adventure activity,
e.g., a trekker;
2. The activity that is carried out, e.g., trekking;
3. The place where the activity is carried out, e.g., in the mountain, or
along which it is carried out, e.g., a trail;
4. The equipment employed to carry out the activity, e.g., a stick,
trekking boots, etc. This can subsequently be divided into four
subcategories: clothing and footwear, safety, vehicle (with or without
engine), and complementary material.
With these four categories (and their subcategories), we can organise
most of the terms that are extracted from the ADVENCOR corpus (cf. Section
3.1.), which means that the majority of this terminology revolves around the
activities that are offered in this segment and imply the use of verbs, as
explained above. In addition, this terminology includes a broad range of terms
from adventure sports (or risk sports) such as climbing, canyoning, caving,
among others, which are practised professionally and, therefore, at a more
advanced level. These terms refer especially to the type of equipment needed
to practise these activities, like the type of rope used for climbing, special
clothing, safety items, and so on.
Other relevant aspects about the terminology of this tourism segment
that can be highlighted are: (1) the use of foreign words especially in
languages different from English, such as Spanish; examples of these terms
are trekking, mushing, hydrobob, or nordic walking in Spanish, and their
extensive use could even convince the Real Academia Española to include
Isabel Durán-Muñoz and Eva Lucía Jiménez-Navarro 7
Hikma 23 (Número especial I) (2024), 1 - 22
them in their well-known Spanish dictionary, like aquaplaning;2 (2) the creation
of neologisms to name or to adapt (existing) adventure activities, like zorbing
or aquasailing; (3) the frequent presence of polysemy, that is, the use of a
term to refer to different concepts, such as climb (noun) and to climb (verb);
and (4) the variability of names of the adventure activities, like flysurfing and
kitesurfing or rappel and abseiling in English, and barranquismo and descenso
de barrancos in Spanish.
Finally, an interesting aspect which, to the best of our knowledge, has
not been analysed so far regarding the terminology of this specialised
segment refers to the real use in promotional texts of the key terms that define
it. To put it differently, as mentioned in the introduction of this article, there are
several terms that characterise the activities performed in this niche of
tourism, which are adventure, nature, and risk (and their adjectival forms
adventurous, natural, and risky), as will be explained in Section 3.2., in English
and their equivalents in Spanish (aventura”, naturaleza, and riesgo”,and
aventurero,” natural,” and arriesgado”/“peligroso). Therefore, the purpose
of this paper is to analyse their frequency of use and combinatorial properties
with the aim of gaining some insights into the keyness of these terms in this
specialised field and the main differences or similarities between the two
working languages. In Section 3, we present the methodology followed to
achieve these objectives and to provide the main findings of the study.
3. METHODOLOGY
The methodology applied in this work involved four different steps,
which were: (1) the compilation of a specialised comparable (English-Spanish)
corpus, (2) the search for the main keywords that define the domain of
adventure tourism, (3) a quantitative analysis based on the frequency of use
of these keywords in every language, and (4) a qualitative analysis in terms
of the phraseological combinations of the keywords in English and Spanish.
In the following sections we provide more details of every step.
3.1. Compilation of ADVENCOR EN / ES
The first step of our methodology was the compilation of a specialised
comparable (English-Spanish) corpus, which we called ADVENCOR
(Durán-Muñoz & Jiménez-Navarro, 2021). Both subcorpora, ADVENCOR EN
and ADVENCOR ES, were built by applying the same set of external criteria
(Biber, 1993; Sinclair, 2003), specifically:
2 Aquaplaning was added to the Spanish dictionary in its update of 2023. The term is defined in
the same way as it is in English (i.e., to practise water-skiing on a thin board) and has not suffered
any spelling modification or adjustment.
8 The language of adventure tourism and its key terms in English and Spanish
Hikma 23 (Número especial I) (2024), 1 - 22
1. Time of publication: the selected texts had been published in the past
five years on the Internet, which would allow the most up-to-date
linguistic analysis;
2. Geography: the texts making the English subcorpus had been
originally published in English-speaking countries (e.g., the United
Kingdom, Ireland, the USA), while the texts contained in the Spanish
subcorpus had been released in Spain; this way, the corpus would
block any hint of typical dialectical patterns;
3. Authorship: the texts had been written by public and/or private
institutions dedicated to tourism, thus ensuring no authorial style in
the corpus;
4. Text type: the texts chosen belonged to the promotional genre, given
that it is admitted that the specialised language of tourism is a
language for promotion (Dann, 1996; Federici, 2018; Mănescu, 2020;
Nigro, 2006), so it would make our corpus a representative one of the
domain under study; hence, the purpose of the texts was to woo
tourists interested in adventure tourism in general and adventure
activities in particular;
5. Text length: we selected complete written texts (as opposed to
fragments of texts, such as abstracts or methods in research papers);
6. Level of specialisation: the publishers of the texts were experts on the
subject matter, although the receivers of the messages may be
common people, which would explain the lay terminology resulting in
the corpus.
After having established the texts’ selection criteria, a total of 33
keywords and phrases representing adventure tourism were picked to extract
a list of potential websites that met the aforementioned criteria (Durán-Muñoz,
2019, p. 358). More specifically, the New Corpusfunction integrated in the
software Sketch Engine was trusted and these keywords and phrases were
keyed in. Although the process was carried out automatically, it was also
carefully monitored so as to avoid irrelevant or inappropriate websites that
could skew the final results. In fact, 30% of the URLs provided were discarded
during the compilation of ADVENCOR EN due to their irrelevant contents (e.g.,
Wikipedia, Amazon), duplication, or authorship. After having finally selected
the texts, the corpus was built and annotated, resulting in a bilingual
English-Spanish corpus whose features are shown in Table 1.
Isabel Durán-Muñoz and Eva Lucía Jiménez-Navarro 9
Hikma 23 (Número especial I) (2024), 1 - 22
EN ES
Number of words 1,064,664 1,118,903
Type of corpus Specialised / electronic
Mode Written
Language English Spanish
Domain / Subdomain Tourism / Adventure tourism
Genre Promotional
Text length Full texts
Purpose Terminological and phraseological analysis
Communicative situation Semi-specialised
Publication date Previous five years
Source of texts Websites
Authorship English-speaking public
and private institutions
Spanish public and
private institutions
Table 1. Distinctive characteristics of ADVENCOR
Source. Own elaboration
3.2. Search for keywords
After the compilation of the specialised corpus, the keywords defining
the segment under study were investigated using the Keywordsfunction of
Sketch Engine, which compares the relative frequency of words in the corpus
being analysed to a reference corpus available in the tool. As it has been
previously mentioned, adventure tourism is conceived as a type of alternative
tourism according to which the tourist is actively involved in adventure
activities that take place in nature and offer certain levels of risk. Hence, the
nominal keywords selected were adventure, nature, and risk in English and
aventura, naturaleza, and riesgo in Spanish. Some well-known definitions of
adventure tourism that support our keywords selection (highlighted in bold by
the authors of this paper) are provided below:
[It is] the sum of the phenomena and relationships arising from the
interactions of adventure touristic activities with the natural
environment away from the participant’s usual residence area and
containing elements of risk in which the outcome is influenced by the
participation, setting, and the organiser of the tourist’s experience.
(Sung, 1996, as cited in Sung et al., 1996, p. 53)
10 The language of adventure tourism and its key terms in English and Spanish
Hikma 23 (Número especial I) (2024), 1 - 22
[It] involves travel and leisure activities that are contracted into in the
hope that they will produce a rewarding adventure experience.An
adventure experience will be of a heightened nature and involve a
range of emotions, of which excitement will be key. It will entail
intellectual, spiritual, physical or emotional risks and challenges.
(Swarbrooke et al., 2003, p. 27)
Es un turismo en la naturaleza [...] Consiste en un tipo de turismo
activo, puesto que requiere de un comportamiento activo de los turistas
a la hora de realizar las actividades de aventura, es decir, actividades
que incluyen cierto elemento de riesgo, desconocimiento y desafío,
tanto mental como psicológico [...]. (Durán-Muñoz, 2013, p. 255)
Entre la amplia oferta de actividades que engloba el turismo deportivo
se encuentra el turismo activo, el cual se centra en la práctica de
deportes de aventura en la naturaleza; por esta razón también se
denomina turismo de aventura. Al margen de otros deportes, existe una
actividad turística que atrae un turista muy diferente al hasta ahora visto.
Se trata de los deportes de aventura, cada vez más demandados por
consumidores amantes del riesgo y con un espíritu aventurero.
(Calvopiña Andrade et al., 2017, p. 9)
It involves adventurous travel where there is exploration and physical
exertion, and the travel has a perceived or real risk involved; the
adventure tourists often step outside their comfort zone and experience
a rush or flow […]. The experience is not about taking risks or pushing
personal boundaries […] Adventure tourism is closely related to nature-
based tourism […]. (Huddart & Stott, 2020, p. 2)
[...] el turismo de aventura guarda relación con el turismo cultural que
se relaciona también con una combinación entre la naturaleza y la
identidad. [...] De esta manera al hablar del turismo de aventura se hace
necesario hablar sobre los deportes de aventuras. [...] Ahora bien, en
el turismo de aventura debe hacerse referencia también al riesgo.
(Tapia-Pazmiño et al., 2021, pp. 568, 569, 570)
As can be seen, in some cases the adjectival forms of the keywords
selected are used in the definitions. For this reason, the adjectives
adventurous, natural, and risky, on the one hand, and aventurero, natural, and
arriesgado/peligroso, on the other, were also considered.
3.3. Comparative quantitative analysis
The frequencies of use of the keywords selected were extracted in
every subcorpus, that is, ADVENCOR EN and ADVENCOR ES. At this step, we
unexpectedly discovered that some of the terms were not regarded as
keywords by Sketch Engine.
Isabel Durán-Muñoz and Eva Lucía Jiménez-Navarro 11
Hikma 23 (Número especial I) (2024), 1 - 22
First, regarding the English terms, adventure was ranked 39th with a
frequency per million of 3,712.77 tokens in the focus corpus (vs 47.01 in the
reference corpus) and a keyness score of 77.4 (vs 466.2, which was the
keyness score of the term ranked first, ferrata). As for nature and risk, none
of them was retrieved (neither were their adjectival forms), although the
adjective adventurous was ranked 99th on the resulting list, with a frequency
per million of 176.56 tokens in the focus corpus and 3.87 in the reference
corpus, and a keyness score of 36.4.
Second, with respect to the Spanish terms, the adventure’s counterpart
aventura was ranked higher, that is, in the 29th position, with a frequency per
million of 6,124.31 tokens in the focus corpus (vs 44.96 in the reference
corpus) and a keyness score of 133.3 (vs 954, which was the keyness score
of the term ranked first, barranquismo). These numbers show that the keyness
value of the term in ADVENCOR ES is more significant than in ADVENCOR EN.
In fact, several compounds containing the word aventura were also extracted
as key terms, such as multiaventura, as well as names of travel agencies, for
instance, Turiaventura, Cuencaventura, or TurAventura. One more difference
is that the Spanish term naturaleza was regarded as a key term by Sketch
Engine. That is, it was ranked 703rd and showed a frequency per million of
1,272.41 tokens in the focus corpus (vs 111.82 in the reference corpus) and
a keyness score of 11.3. On the other hand, the adjective aventurero (whose
counterpart was also retrieved in English) was included in a higher position on
the list, more specifically, it was ranked 207th with a frequency per million of
147.92 tokens in the focus corpus and 4.89 in the reference corpus, and a
keyness score of 25.3.
Despite these differences between the English and the Spanish
subcorpora, we can establish some similarities considering the keywords
extracted by Sketch Engine. For example, most of the more prominent terms
on the lists are directly related to the semantic categories explained in Section
2 (Durán-Muñoz, 2013), that is, (1) the adventure activities carried out in the
nature, such as canyoning (ranked 3rd) and barranquismo (ranked 1st),
climbing (ranked 15th) and escalada (ranked 27th), or mountaineering (ranked
16th) and montañismo (ranked 48th); (2) the equipment employed when doing
these activities, for instance, zipline (ranked 5th) and tirolina (ranked 11th),
kayak (ranked 10th in ADVENCOR EN) and kayak (ranked 6th in ADVENCOR
ES), or canoe (ranked 36th) and canoa (ranked 20th); (3) the places where
the activities take place, such as ferrata (ranked 1st in ADVENCOR EN and 7th
12 The language of adventure tourism and its key terms in English and Spanish
Hikma 23 (Número especial I) (2024), 1 - 22
in ADVENCOR ES), canyon (ranked 34th) and barranco (ranked 14th), and
proper names like dolomite (ranked 19th) and guadarrama (ranked 41st).3
Given this situation, and in order to make sure that the keywords
selected for this research were relevant to the understanding of adventure
tourism, the Concordancefunction of the software was used, which would
inform of their frequency in the corpus under analysis. Besides that, the
frequency per million of every keyword in the specialised corpus was matched
against the frequency per million of the same terms in a reference corpus
(“enTenTen20 in English and esTenTen18in Spanish) in order to ensure
that they could be regarded as representative of the domain under study. After
having done so, the frequencies of both the nominal and adjectival terms were
compared in English and in Spanish.
3.4. Comparative qualitative analysis
The last step of this work was a qualitative analysis based on the
phraseological combinations in which the keywords co-occurred and on their
use in context in both English and Spanish. Thus, the Word Sketchfunction
of Sketch Engine was relied upon, given that it offers a summary of the
grammatical and lexical combinations of words, whereas the Concordance
function of the software was used to check the contexts of use of the
co-occurrences.
4. RESULTS
As aforementioned, the keywords selected in this study were
adventure, nature, and risk in English and aventura, naturaleza, and riesgo in
Spanish, as well as their adjectival derivatives adventurous, natural, and risky,
and aventurero, natural, and arriesgado/peligroso, respectively. Section 4.1.
shows the results obtained in the comparative quantitative analysis of these
terms, whereas Section 4.2. describes the results that the comparative
qualitative analysis yielded.
4.1. Quantitative analysis of English-Spanish keywords
Table 2 displays the number of tokens of the keywords selected in both
ADVENCOR EN and ADVENCOR ES.4
3 These proper names should be written in capital letters and plural, if necessary (i.e., Dolomites
and Guadarrama), but we indicate here the lemmatised forms provided by Sketch Engine.
4 It must be emphasised that Sketch Engine allows the extraction of all the forms of the lemmas,
so singular, plural, masculine, and feminine forms of the keywords selected were considered.
Isabel Durán-Muñoz and Eva Lucía Jiménez-Navarro 13
Hikma 23 (Número especial I) (2024), 1 - 22
ADVENCOR EN ADVENCOR ES
adventure 4,416 aventura 8,138
nature 643 naturaleza 1,686
risk 502 riesgo 451
adventurous 210 aventurero 196
natural 521 natural 1,969
risky 17 arriesgado/
peligroso 6/89
Table 2. Frequency of the keywords selected in ADVENCOR
Source. Own elaboration
First of all, it must be said that, according to Sketch Engine, the only
real keywords of adventure tourism are adventure and adventurous in English,
and aventura, aventurero, and naturaleza in Spanish, given that they were the
ones extracted with the Keywords function, as explained in Section 3.3.
Nevertheless, after comparing the frequency per million of every keyword in
both the specialised corpus and a reference corpus, we were entitled to
confirm that the rest of the keywords selected are representative of adventure
tourism too, since the presence of these terms in the specialised subcorpora
is much higher than in the reference corpora. For example, the frequency per
million of adventure and aventura in ADVENCOR is 3,712.77 and 6,135.7
tokens, respectively, whereas their frequency per million in the reference
corpora is 44.8 and 45.36 tokens, respectively. Similarly, when it comes to the
frequency per million of nature and naturaleza, the specialised corpus
retrieves 540.6 and 1,271.17 tokens, respectively, while the reference corpora
extract 137.47 and 111.82 tokens, respectively.
As for the nominal terms, it can be observed in Table 2 that both
aventura and naturaleza are far more frequent in ADVENCOR than adventure
and nature (8,138 and 1,686 tokens vs 4,416 and 643 tokens, respectively).
However, risk and riesgo show an almost similar recurrence, with risk slightly
standing out (502 vs 451).
Regarding the use of the adjectival terms, the frequencies of
adventurous and aventurero are quite close (210 vs 196 tokens), whereas
there is a significant difference between the recurrence of natural in ADVENCOR
ES (1,969 tokens) and natural in ADVENCOR EN (521 tokens). In other words,
this adjective is almost four times more frequent in Spanish than in English.
14 The language of adventure tourism and its key terms in English and Spanish
Hikma 23 (Número especial I) (2024), 1 - 22
Last but not least, risky is seldom used in English (17 tokens), albeit a bit more
recurrent than its counterpart arriesgado in Spanish (6 tokens). Even so, the
second possible equivalent of risky in Spanish, that is, peligroso, is much more
common than the previous ones (89 tokens). Nevertheless, after checking the
frequency of a possible equivalent of risky, that is, dangerous, in ADVENCOR
EN, it must be said that it is even more recurrent in English than its
counterparts in Spanish, for the specialised subcorpus yields 100 tokens.
4.2. Qualitative analysis of English-Spanish keywords
The previous section has shown that, in general, the keywords selected
are much more recurrent in ADVENCOR ES than in ADVENCOR EN.
Nevertheless, we must turn our attention now to the phraseological features
of the terms and their behaviour in context. For example, the output of the
phraseology extraction containing the nominal keywords under study confirms
that they produce the same combinations in both languages.
With respect to adventure and aventura, they are used as a noun
modified by qualifying adjectives (example (1)5), but they also act themselves
as modifiers of several nouns, such as activity/actividad, tourism/turismo, and
sport/deporte (example (2)):
(1) a. Don’t miss this exciting adventure full of history and
spectacular scenery. / Embárquese en una emocionante
aventura al aire libre en el corazón del antiguo Imperio
Inca.
b. Colorado Via Ferrata is the newest extreme adventure
from AVA. / Te damos hasta 10 motivos por los que
deberías experimentar esta aventura extrema en tu vida.
(2) a. It also provides specific information to assist
organisations and individual leaders plan and run
adventure activities for various groups. / Damos
comienzo al verano 2019 con todas nuestras actividades
de aventura en Galicia.
b. This swing in attitude could herald a renaissance in
adventure tourism. / El turismo de aventura ofrece la
posibilidad de vivir muchas experiencias distintas.
c. It is your tourist destination for a range of adventure
sports but mainly hang gliding would catch your keen
5 The relevant items in the contexts have been highlighted in bold by the authors of this paper.
Isabel Durán-Muñoz and Eva Lucía Jiménez-Navarro 15
Hikma 23 (Número especial I) (2024), 1 - 22
interest. / Descarga adrenalina y realiza deportes de
aventura extremos antes de que te arrepientas.
Regarding the nouns nature/naturaleza, they produced the same types
of adjective + noun and verb + noun collocations in both languages, as it can
be seen in examples (3) and (4), respectively:
(3) a. You are situated in wild nature, in clear air and in a
good company of lovers of unknown terrain where the
human foot has not yet set. / Desembarcaremos para
recorrer la zona y sus inmediaciones a pie, en un área
cercana al glaciar, donde estaremos rodeados de
naturaleza salvaje y tundra.
b. No roads, no trails, no cabins, just pure nature. / [...]
actividades acuáticas en el nacimiento del Río Atoyac, en
el Valle de Amatlan, en pleno contacto con la naturaleza
más pura.
(4) a. The less people around (you), the more likely you are to
feel unspoiled nature. / Siente la naturaleza y vívela
intensamente con la máxima tranquilidad.
b. We welcome diversity, folks who can laugh and people
who respect nature and all the beauty it has to offer us! /
[...] rutas en 4x4 con los coches adecuados y siempre
respetando la naturaleza del entorno.
As for the last nominal keywords addressed in this analysis, also
risk/riesgo co-occur in similar sorts of phraseological combinations, such as
adjective + noun and verb + noun (examples (5) and (6), respectively), as well
as collocations in which the noun acts as a modifier of a different noun,
specifically, activity/actividad (example (7), in the same way as
adventure/aventura):
(5) a. However, this sport involves high risk of landslide,
sudden weather changes, snowstorm and many unknown
dangers. / [...] debemos destacar el paracaidismo o
skydive, un deporte de aventura extremo de alto riesgo.
b. Canyoneering has inherent risks and you assume
complete responsibility for your own safety. / La decisión
de participar en estas actividades supone que el
participante asume el riesgo inherente a la actividad [...].
16 The language of adventure tourism and its key terms in English and Spanish
Hikma 23 (Número especial I) (2024), 1 - 22
(6) It will help maximise an activity’s success and minimise
risks to participants. / Escalada deportiva: usa sistemas
de seguridad que disminuyen notablemente el riesgo
para los escaladores, si bien se aumenta la dificultad en
la actividad.
(7) Whilst there is potential for serious misadventure, with
appropriate training, safety briefing and leader
qualifications, it is a relatively low risk activity. / El
puenting, al igual que cualquier otra actividad de riesgo,
tiene el incentivo de la adrenalina para su práctica.
On the other hand, it must be said that this situation did not arise in the
phraseology of the adjectival terms under study. First, adventurous is more
productive in terms of collocations and collocational types than aventurero,
given that it is a frequent element of adverb + adjective (e.g., wildly
adventurous), verb + adjective (e.g., feel adventurous), and adjective + noun
(e.g., adventurous activity) combinations, whereas its Spanish counterpart is
only productive in adjective + noun combinations. Despite that, one collocation
that both languages share is adventurous spirit/espíritu aventurero, which is,
in fact, one of the strongest combinations for each term (their association
score is 10.6 and 11.8, respectively 14 is the maximum score possible).
Example (8) represents these collocations in context:
(8) Breathtaking scenery beckons thrill seekers and our
diverse landscape provides an outlet for your
adventurous spirit. / Este deporte es ideal para todos los
amantes de la naturaleza y para aquellos que cuentan con
espíritu aventurero.
Second, the adjective natural/natural does show some types of
similarities in terms of its phraseology in English and Spanish. On the one
hand, it co-occurs in adjective + noun collocations with the same nouns, such
as beauty/belleza, environment/entorno, or slide/tobogán; contexts of use are
included in example (9).
(9) a. Unspoiled, natural beauty surrounds you as you dive
deep into the Costa Rica Rainforest, leaving civilization
behind. / En el Parque Cañón del Sumidero se puede
navegar por sus aguas y disfrutar de las bellezas
naturales que lo rodean.
b. Explore, take a swim in the pristine waters, photograph
the abundant wildlife, or simply relax in this unique natural
environment. / Subirse a una piragua, remar y disfrutar
Isabel Durán-Muñoz and Eva Lucía Jiménez-Navarro 17
Hikma 23 (Número especial I) (2024), 1 - 22
del entorno natural es un verdadero goce para muchas
personas.
c. Those of you who enjoy abseiling descents and natural
slides will also be satisfied. / En el barranco nos
encontraremos saltos, toboganes naturales y, sobre
todo, preciosos paisajes.
Third, we previously mentioned that the adjective risky may have two
equivalents in Spanish, namely, arriesgadoand peligroso”. Nevertheless, it
was shown that peligroso is far more recurrent in adventure tourism, which
may be the reason why only peligroso produced collocations in this work. As
for the more latent collocates shared by both languages, they are
activity/actividad and sport/deporte (which also co-occurred with
adventure/aventura), exemplified in (10). It is important to realise that
activity/actividad also co-occur with the nominal terms risk/riesgo acting as
adjectival modifiers, as it has been shown above. On the other hand, peligroso
is highly productive compared to risky, for risky only provided 10 collocates in
total, whereas peligroso tripled that result.
(10) a. Mountain climbing, like rock climbing, is a risky activity
and not to be taken lightly […]. / La naturaleza vertical de
la práctica del rápel la hace una actividad peligrosa si no
se realiza adecuadamente.
b. There is least risk involved in bungee jumping, although
it is thought to be a risky sport. / Para los más
experimentados se puede practicar uno de los deportes
extremos más peligrosos del mundo, el espeleobuceo o
buceo en cuevas.
CONCLUSIONS
The initial hypothesis of this work was the thought that the use of the
main keywords defining adventure tourism would be similar in the languages
under study, namely, English and Spanish. Therefore, our objective was the
analysis of a set of nominal terms and their adjectival derivatives which
characterise this domain. Accordingly, the keywords selected were
adventure/aventura, nature/naturaleza, and risk/riesgo because adventure
tourism is supposed to involve adventure activities that take place in nature
and which are likely to incorporate elements of risk (cf. Section 3.2.), such as
abseiling, scuba diving, and so on.
In this context, our objective was an approach to these nominal
keywords and the corresponding adjectives (i.e., adventurous, natural, risky
18 The language of adventure tourism and its key terms in English and Spanish
Hikma 23 (Número especial I) (2024), 1 - 22
in English and aventurero, natural, arriesgado/peligroso in Spanish) in order
to know the frequency of these terms in the ADVENCOR corpus (quantitative
analysis) as well as their combinatorial properties and contexts of use
(qualitative analysis).
Regarding the first type of analysis, the terms under study were found
to be more recurrent in ADVENCOR ES than in ADVENCOR EN. What is more,
only adventure and adventurous were extracted as keywords of this domain
in English according to Sketch Engine, whereas in Spanish, the tool detected
three keywords, aventura, aventurero, and naturaleza. In spite of that, we
made sure that the other terms could still be regarded as keywords defining
adventure tourism after matching their frequency per million against reference
corpora.
Moving on to the second type of analysis, we discovered that the
equivalent nominal terms produced the same sorts of collocations in both
languages. However, when it came to the phraseology of the adjectives, we
encountered three different situations: (1) adventurous was more productive
both in terms of collocations and collocational types than aventurero, (2)
natural in English produced similar collocations to natural in Spanish, and (3)
peligroso was more productive than risky in terms of the number of
collocations (not in terms of collocational types); arriesgado did not produce
any collocations.
Overall, we can state that our initial hypothesis was partially confirmed,
depending on which aspect of our analysis we look at. That is, in frequency
terms, the use of the keywords selected is higher in Spanish than in English;
in quality terms, these keywords are equivalent and their use in context is
similar, although their collocational productivity is not always the same.
Further research may explore nominal keywords other than the ones
selected here (e.g., those retrieved by the Keywords function of Sketch
Engine) and undertake a comparative analysis in English and in Spanish.
Similarly, a contrastive study of the combinatorial properties of those
keywords may be performed. Finally, research on other types of keywords
(e.g., adjectives, verbs) may be conducted.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work has been (partially) carried out within the framework of the
R&D Project VIP II (PID2020-112818GB-I00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033)
and RECOVER (Ref. ProyExcel_00540).
Isabel Durán-Muñoz and Eva Lucía Jiménez-Navarro 19
Hikma 23 (Número especial I) (2024), 1 - 22
REFERENCES
ATTA (Adventure Travel Trade Association) (2024a, November 24). Values
Statement. https://about.adventuretravel.biz/values
ATTA (Adventure Travel Trade Association) (2024b, November 24). What is
Adventure Travel? https://solutions.adventuretravel.biz/what-is-
adventure-travel
Biber, D. (1993). Representativeness in corpus design. Literary and Linguistic
Computing, 8(4), 243-257. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/8.4.243
Calvi, M. V. (2009). El lenguaje del turismo. In M. V. Calvi, C. Bordonaba
Zabalza, G. Mapelli, & J. Santos López (Eds.), Las lenguas de
especialidad en español (pp. 199-224). Carocci Editore.
Calvi, M. V. (2010). Los géneros discursivos en la lengua del turismo: Una
propuesta de clasificación. Ibérica: Revista de la Asociación Europea
de Lenguas para Fines Específicos (AELFE), 19, 9-32.
Calvi, M. V. (2014, April 2-4). Guía de viaje y turismo 2.0: Los borrosos
confines de un género [Conference session]. Simposio Internacional
Discurso y Géneros del Turismo 2.0, Valencia, Spain.
https://www.uv.es/cometval/wikibase/cas/Simposio/home.html
Calvi, M. V., & Bonomi, M. (2008). El lenguaje del turismo: De los textos
especializados a la comunidad del viajero. In C. Navarro, R. M.
Rodríguez Abella, F. Dalle Pezze, & R. Miotti (Eds.), La comunicación
especializada (pp. 181-202). Peter Lang.
Calvopiña Andrade, D. M., Rodríguez Piña, R. A., Velasco Samaniego, V. M.,
& Granizo Molina, K. P. (2017). Desarrollo del producto turístico de
aventura al diversificar la oferta turística en el Ecuador. Caso de
estudio. Revista Turydes: Turismo y Desarrollo, 10(23), 1-34.
Dann, G. M. S. (1996). The language of tourism. A sociolinguistic perspective.
CAB International.
Dann, G. M. S. (2007). Revisiting the language of tourism: What tourists and
tourees are saying. In C. de Stasio, & O. Palusci (Eds.), The language
of tourism. Turismo e mediazione (pp. 15-32). Edizioni Unicopli.
DicoAdventure (2024, November 24). DicoAdventure. Diseño y desarrollo de
un recurso electrónico especializado bilingüe (inglés, español) sobre el
turismo de aventura a partir de marcos semánticos.
https://www.uco.es/dicoadventure/
20 The language of adventure tourism and its key terms in English and Spanish
Hikma 23 (Número especial I) (2024), 1 - 22
DicoAdventure. Online dictionary of adventure tourism. (2024, November 24).
DicoAdventure. Online dictionary of adventure tourism.
https://olst.ling.umontreal.ca/dicoadventure/
DiCoEnviro. Dictionnaire fondamental de l’environnement. (2024, November
24). DiCoEnviro. Dictionnaire fondamental de l’environnement.
https://olst.ling.umontreal.ca/dicoenviro/moteur/search-enviro.cgi
Durán-Muñoz, I. (2008). La traducción turística y la evaluación de su calidad.
In P. Sánchez Hernández, P. Pérez-Paredes, P. Aguado Jiménez, & R.
Criado Sánchez (Eds.), Researching and teaching specialized
languages: New contexts, new challenges. Actas del VII Congreso de
la Asociación Europea de Lenguas para Fines Específicos AELFE
(pp. 480-492). Editum.
Durán-Muñoz, I. (2012). La ontoterminografía aplicada a la traducción.
Propuesta metodológica para la elaboración de recursos
terminológicos dirigidos a traductores. Peter Lang.
https://doi.org/10.3726/978-3-653-01340-5
Durán-Muñoz, I. (2013). El turismo de aventura en textos promocionales y su
terminología. In M. Á. Candel Mora (Ed.), El lenguaje del turismo y la
publicidad: terminología y traducción (pp. 251-277). Wolters Kluwer.
Durán-Muñoz, I. (2019). Adjectives and their keyness. A corpus-based
analysis in English tourism. Corpora, 14(3), 351-378.
https://doi.org/10.3366/cor.2019.0178
Durán-Muñoz, I., & Jiménez-Navarro, E. L. (2021). Colocaciones verbales en
el turismo de aventura: Estudio contrastivo inglés-español. In G.
Corpas Pastor, M.ª R. Bautista Zambrana, & C. M. Hidalgo-Ternero
(Eds.), Sistemas fraseológicos en contraste: enfoques
computacionales y de corpus (pp. 121-142). Comares.
Durán-Muñoz, I., & L’Homme, M.-C. (2020). Diving into adventure tourism
from a lexico-semantic approach: An analysis of English motion verbs.
Terminology, 26(1), 33-59. https://doi.org/10.1075/term.00041.dur
Federici, E. (2018). Translation theory and practice. Cultural differences in
tourism and advertising. Paolo Loffredo Editore.
Fillmore, C. J. (1976). Frame semantics and the nature of language. Annals
of the New York Academy of Sciences, 280(1), 2032.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-6632.1976.tb25467.x
Isabel Durán-Muñoz and Eva Lucía Jiménez-Navarro 21
Hikma 23 (Número especial I) (2024), 1 - 22
Fillmore, C. J. (1982). Frame semantics. In Linguistic Society of Korea (Ed.),
Linguistics in the morning calm (pp. 111137). Hanshin Publishing
Company.
Fillmore, C. J. (1985). Frames and the semantics of understanding. Quaderni
di Semantica, 6(2), 222254.
Fillmore, C. J. (2006). Frame semantics. In D. Geeraerts (Ed.), Cognitive
linguistics: Basic readings (pp. 373400). Mouton de Gruyter.
Fillmore, C. J., & Atkins, B. T. (1992). Toward a frame-based lexicon: The
semantics of RISK and its neighbors. In A. Lehrer, & E. Kittay (Eds.),
Frames, fields and contrast: New essays in semantics and lexical
organization (pp. 75102). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Fillmore, C. J., & Baker, C. (2015). A frames approach to semantic analysis.
In B. Heine, & H. Narrog (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of linguistic
analysis. Second edition (pp. 791816). Oxford University Press.
Huddart, D., & Stott, T. (2020). Adventure tourism: Environmental impacts and
management. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-
18623-4
Kelly, D. (1997). The translation of texts from the tourist sector: Textual
conventions, cultural distance and other constraints. TRANS, 2, 33-42.
https://doi.org/10.24310/TRANS.1998.v0i2.2354
L’Homme, M.-C. (2020). Lexical semantics for terminology. An introduction.
John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/tlrp.20
Llamas Arjona, C. (2009). Marketing y gestión de calidad turística. Liber
Factory.
Mănescu, O. M. (2020). The complexity of the language of tourism. British and
American Studies, 26, 221-229.
Ministerio de Agricultura y Pesca, Alimentación y Medioambiente (2017). El
turismo de naturaleza en España. Análisis y prospectiva Serie Medio
Ambiente. Publicaciones de la SGAPC, 9, 1-14.
https://www.miteco.gob.es/es/biodiversidad/temas/conservacion-de-
la-
biodiversidad/seriemedioambienten9_turismodenaturalezaenespana_t
cm7-464178_tcm30-481336.pdf
Nigro, M. G. (2006). The language of tourism as LSP? A corpus-based study
of the discourse of guidebooks. In H. Picht (Ed.), Modern approaches
to terminological theories and applications (pp. 187-197). Peter Lang.
22 The language of adventure tourism and its key terms in English and Spanish
Hikma 23 (Número especial I) (2024), 1 - 22
Real Academia Española (2023). Diccionario de la lengua española, 23.ª ed.,
[versión 23.7 en línea]. https://dle.rae.es [11/12/2023].
Ruppenhofer, J., Ellsworth, M., Petruck, M. R. L., Johnson, C. R., Baker, C.
F., & Scheffczyk, J. (2016). FrameNet II: Extended theory and practice.
https://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu/fndrupal/the_book
Sinclair, J. (2003). Corpora for lexicography. In. P. van Sterkenburg (Ed.), A
practical guide to lexicography (pp. 167-178). John Benjamins
Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/tlrp.6.21sin
Sketch Engine [Computer software]. (2023). Lexical Computing Limited.
Sung, H. H. (1996). Definition of adventure travel: Conceptual framework for
empirical application (Unpublished master’s thesis). Purdue University,
West Lafayette, IN, United States.
Sung, H. H., Morrison, A. M., & O’Leary, J. T. (1996). Definition of adventure
travel: Conceptual framework for empirical application for the providers’
perspective. Asia Pacific Journal of Tourism Research, 1(2), 4767.
https://doi.org/10.1080/10941669708721975
Swarbrooke, J., Beard, C., Leckie, S., & Pomfret, G. (2003). Adventure
tourism. The new frontier. Butterworth-Heinemann.
Tapia-Pazmiño, J. G., Quiñonez-Bedón, M. F., & Altamirano-Valdez, D. E.
(2021). El turismo de aventura: Aproximaciones teóricas en torno a la
pandemia del Covid-19. Revista Científica Dominio de las Ciencias,
7(1), 563-574. http://dx.doi.org/10.23857/dc.v7i1.1661
TIES (The International Ecotourism Society) (2023, January 25). What is
Ecotourism? https://ecotourism.org/what-is-ecotourism/
WTO (World Tourism Organization) (2014). AM Reports, Volume nine
Global Report on Adventure Tourism, UNWTO, Madrid. https://www.e-
unwto.org/doi/epdf/10.18111/9789284416622?role=tab