Discursive Sustainability in Tourism: Agency and Perception across Domestic and International Contexts

This study investigates how domestic and international tourism texts construct experiential and cognitive engagement through high-frequency verbs. Using comparable corpora from VisitEngland (domestic) and VisitBritain (international), the analysis combines quantitative frequency analysis with qualitative contextual interpretation, capturing both statistical prominence and semiotic function. Findings show that international texts foreground durative, discovery-oriented experiences, positioning readers as active adventurers, while domestic texts emphasize routine, culturally familiar engagement. The study demonstrates how these lexical choices contribute to discursive sustainability, creating enduring, culturally coherent representations of destinations and shaping audience-specific imaginaries over time.