Functional Analysis of Ecotourism of Ilocos Norte

Abstract

This study examined how verbal and visual resources represent ecotourism in three Facebook tourism promotional videos from Ilocos Norte, Philippines. The corpus comprised the top three entries in the 2023 “Zoom IN” Ilocos Norte Tour Competition. A descriptive multimodal content analysis combined frequency distributions with interpretations informed by systemic functional transitivity, visual grammar, and ideational inter-semiotic complementarity. The reported dataset comprised 39 verbal clauses and 231 selected visual representations. Verbal examples foregrounded food preparation, family relationships, shared memories, and travel, whereas visual examples depicted landscapes, recreational activities, cultural sites, and destination branding. Reactional representations accounted for 79 of the 231 visual entries (34.20%). Three illustrated multimodal episodes contained seven originally coded correspondences, primarily concerning food preparation and family relationships. These patterns suggest that nature-based imagery was more explicit than verbal references to conservation or responsible travel. However, attractive landscapes alone do not establish ecotourism, and the analysis does not demonstrate audience comprehension or persuasion. The findings support closer coordination of narration and imagery when communicating specific conservation practices and community benefits. Limitations include the small purposive corpus, incomplete documentation of coding decisions, and the need to verify aggregate classifications against the original records.