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International Journal of Corpus Linguistics: Online-First Articles

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A corpus linguistic analysis of eBay item descriptions

ORCID logo | Birmingham City University
ORCID logo | Birmingham City University
ORCID logo | Vienna University of Economics and Business
Recent years have seen a considerable increase in e-commerce, with sales forecast to continue rising over the coming years. This study provides a corpus linguistic analysis of item descriptions on eBay’s UK website, on which both members of the public and businesses can offer goods for sale. It is based on two corpora of items sold on the site in 2015 and 2020 which together contain 412,601 item descriptions and over 57 million words of text. The analysis applies corpus linguistic methods to gain further insight into the diachronic development of language use on eBay, to explore linguistic features in item descriptions and across product categories, and to relate word choice to product selling price. Its findings offer new understanding of the changing language of online selling and indicate how a corpus linguistic methodology may be used to explore the impact of linguistic features on sales figures.
Keywords: e-commerce, eBay, item descriptions, word choice, selling price
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Business communication and the study of e-commerce
  • 3.Data
  • 4.Linguistic analysis of eBay item descriptions
    • 4.1General eBay lexicon (RQ 1)
    • 4.2Case study: Used (RQ 2)
    • 4.3Case study: Fake (RQ 3)
    • 4.4Linguistic differences between eBay product categories (RQ 4)
    • 4.5Linguistic variation by selling price (RQ 5)
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
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