A corpus analysis of adjectives in online Malaysian medical tourism magazines / Janet Joseph Samynadan

The study specifically analyses adjectives in 93 articles published in four online magazines known as Healthcare Malaysia produced by Malaysian Healthcare Travel Council (MHTC). MHTC was established under the Ministry of Health Malaysia, bringing together the nation’s dual heritage of hospitality and medical innovation, promoting Malaysia as the preferred healthcare travel destination in the Asian region. The adjectives in these articles are analysed using AntConc and categorized using semantic categorization by Biber, et al. (1999: 508-509). A total of 572 adjectives types were collected and analysed from a corpus of 11,239 word types from the online magazines. The findings reveal a high occurrence of classifying adjectives compared to descriptive adjectives. The results also confirm that adjectives are not at all equivalent in their meaning and have their own preferred collates, different preferred senses and different distributions across registers (Biber, Conrad, and Reppen, 1998: 51). Although there are many differences in the types of adjectives used in medical tourism, there are also similarities found. The results also show the use of certain types of adjectives used to attract, persuade and allure medical tourists to travel to Malaysia for medical tourism purposes