Unpacking the rhetroical structure of online food and drink descriptions

Abstract

This work analyses the rhetorical structure of the genre online food product descriptions in the agri-food sector, building on previous work that has examined the rhetorical structure of various food products such as cheese, wine, herbal teas, dried meat products, bakery products, and olive oil. These studies have provided valuable insights into the language and structure used in the descriptions of these products, revealing patterns and conventions that are specific to this genre through the study of English-Spanish comparable corpora tagged at the rhetorical level. Subcorpora belonging to different online food product descriptions were manually tagged using the Rhetorical move tagger© developed by ACTRES research group so the prototypical rhetorical structure in each language was established for different products such as cheese, wine, bakery, dried-meats, herbal teas, and olive oil. In this study, there rhetorical structures are compared and contrasted to establish a common structure for the genre provided that a comparison of the rhetorical structure reveals similarities that suggest the possibility of a parent genre for the promotion of foods (Izquierdo and Pérez Blanco, 2020: 51). Applying a common rhetorical tagging scheme composed of moves and steps (Biber et al., 2009), often referred to as the gold standard, ensures that our tags are consistent and comparable with those used before, and also allows us to compare our findings with those of previous studies, thus providing a broader context for analysing them. We also conduct an in-depth analysis of the linguistic features of the moves in the common rhetorical structure. This, together with a move-specific database including terms specific to each move, allows us to formulate writing model lines for use in an automatic genre-specific writing tool. Results have significant potential in the development of new tools and the application of artificial intelligence (AI) in this field. The integration of AI into the field of rhetorical analysis will open up new possibilities for research and provide deeper insights into the genre of online food description.