Based on the paper by the same title, forthcoming publication in Corpora, this talk presents a study on adjectivisation in a subdomain of a specialised discourse: adventure tourism. Traditionally, adjectives have been frequently disregarded in terminological studies in favour of other parts of speech such as nouns or verbs, since they have not been considered meaning conveyors, but just simple modifiers. For this reason, adjectives, together with other grammatical categories (i.e. adverbs) are not included as head entries in specialised dictionaries but, if they are at all, included as part of term entries.

With this study, I intend to understand the role that adjectives play in this specific subdomain and to confirm (or reject) previous assumptions regarding the use, and frequency of use, of adjectives and adjectival patterns in this specialised domain. To do so, I present here a corpus-based study that measures the keyness of adjectives in promotional texts of the adventure tourism domain in English by comparing their usage in the compiled corpus to the two most relevant reference corpora in English, COCA and BNC by means of the log ratio statistic measure.