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Part of
Corpora in Translation and Contrastive Research in the Digital Age: Recent advances and explorations
Edited by Julia Lavid-López, Carmen Maíz-Arévalo and Juan Rafael Zamorano-Mansilla
[Benjamins Translation Library 158] 2021
► pp. 283–306

Chapter 11
Generic analysis of mobile application reviews in English and Spanish

A contrastive corpus-based study

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In this paper, the Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) approach to genre is applied to English and Spanish mobile application reviews from Google Play Store. These reviews are shown to be divisible into two optional stages, namely Evaluation and Description, the first part being more subjective and based on the author’s opinion and the second one more objective and focused on describing issues. The frequency of use of the Attitude axis from Appraisal Theory provides support for the distinction of those stages. The combination of the polarity of the contents of each stage together with the number of stars given to the item reviewed creates six patterns for the reviews. However, no noticeable differences between English and Spanish reviews were observed.

Keywords: product reviews, application stores, appraisal theory, genre, SFL
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Theoretical framework
    • Genre analysis
    • Appraisal theory
  • The mobile application review genre and the corpus
    • General characteristics of mobile application and game reviews
    • Comparison with reviews about other products and from other platforms
    • Corpus
  • Generic stages in mobile application reviews
    • Lexicogrammatical features of stages
    • Patterns observed in the stages
      • Distribution of staging patterns in the English and Spanish corpora
    • Most important problems in the (automatic) analysis of application and game reviews
  • Summary and concluding remarks
  • References
Published online: 8 December 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.158.11mor
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