A corpus-based study of reviewers’ usage of speech acts

Abstract

This study examines online reviews about booking a hotel room to see what factors affect reviewers’ rating and make online reviews persuasive to the reader. Linguists study online reviews from different perspectives such as their communicative functions, their discourse features, their stylistic features, and other perspectives. The study describes the types of speech acts used by the reviewers and examines their purposes to find out how to rate, evaluate and describe a product or service, and on that basis, to provide recommendations to others for or against a particular product or service. The study is conducted on 100 online reviews from two famous social media sites TripAdvisor and Booking.com using a corpus-based approach that is used to verify expectations and assumptions about the function of speech acts. 1976) theory of Speech Acts is applied in this research as the major theory, besides Aristotle’s Persuasion theory and Vásquez’s framework that is based on Halliday’s lexico-grammatical approach. The classification includes the different types of speech act, namely, representatives, directives, commissives, expressives and declarations. The study mainly adopts a content analysis in which the collected data is analyzed by categorizing keywords and identifying the relationships among these words. Moreover, it investigates the usage of speech acts and on a more detailed study of how speech acts function as rating tools in social media reviewers. Results show that online reviews are a very rich digital genre that show a variation of usage of speech acts that perform different functions such as thanking, apologizing, complaining, describing, commanding, … etc. Thus, it can be concluded that an online review is a multi-function genre and its main purpose is being a persuasive text that affects the reader either positively or negatively.