Expressing Surprise. A Cross-Linguistic Description of Mirativity

Emotions play a decisive role in promotional discourse. The power of logical argument may not be sufficient to convince customers. For this reason, writers or speakers usually appeal to the audience’s emotional response to achieve persuasion. This study aims at discussing mirativity markers in two parallel corpora of tourist guides, one comprising Italian tourist guides, the other their corresponding translations into English. After dwelling upon the explicit encoding of surprise, the analysis deals with the semantic features of the adverb even and its exploitation for promotional purposes. The two corpora provide not only a wealth of examples to illustrate the different ways of conveying mirative meanings but also an invaluable tool for understanding the strategic role played by translation in the field of tourist promotion, since some linguistic choices appear to be the result of the translation process.