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Article published In: Register and social media
Edited by Isobelle Clarke and Jack Grieve
[Register Studies 4:2] 2022
► pp. 288–322

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Linguistic variation in customer reviews

One’s own vs. another’s experience narrative

ORCiD logo with link | Hebrew University of Jerusalem
ORCiD logo with link | Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Published online: 6 October 2022
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/rs.22004.ves
Abstract
Informed by the framework of register analysis (Biber, D., & Egbert, J. (2018). Register variation online. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) and narrative analysis Labov, W., & Waletzky, J. (1967). Narrative analysis. In J. Helm (Ed.), Essays on the verbal and visual arts (pp. 12–44). Seattle/London: University of Washington Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), this paper studies customer reviews of assistive reading devices to identify intra-register variation between narratives of one’s own and another’s experience. The lexico-grammatical features differentiating the two experience types include the use of pronouns, references to animate and inanimate entities, patterns of user and product description, stance markers, negation, as well as expectation- and transaction-related lemmas. The study reveals that the distribution of these features is determined by the narrative ownership and the associated distinctions in expectations. Furthermore, the difference in narrative ownership results in variation with respect to the experience narrative composition.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background
    • 2.1Service experience narrative
    • 2.2Customer reviews in the landscape of online registers
    • 2.3Linguistic representations of customer expectations, experience, and evaluation
    • 2.4Situational characteristics of customer reviews
  • 3.The data and methods
    • 3.1Corpus collection
    • 3.2Corpus tagging for one’s own or another’s experience
    • 3.3Analysis of linguistic variation between one’s own and another’s experience narrative
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Personal and possessive pronominal forms
    • 4.2Animate versus inanimate
    • 4.3Description: User, product features, product use
    • 4.4Stance: Verbs and adjectives
    • 4.5Adverbs
    • 4.6Transaction-related lemmas
    • 4.7Expectation lemmas
    • 4.8Negation
    • 4.9Other linguistic features
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Endnotes
  • References
References (41)
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