Chapter 8
Intensification in online consumer reviews
Insights from Chinese
This study adds to the growing literature on online consumer reviews by analyzing intensification in Chinese online consumer reviews from a dataset of 355 user-generated online comments on the Kindle Paperwhite E-reader on Amazon China. The study first analyzes the usage and frequency of different types of intensification in reviews. The distribution of intensification devices is then investigated according to review valence (negative vs. positive). Since Chinese writing is based on characters rather than alphabets, some particular uses of Chinese intensification are identified and discussed. The study demonstrates that the exploration of intensification in Chinese online consumer reviews can enrich and provide further insights for research on this genre.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Online consumer reviews
- 3.Intensification
- 4.Data sample and data analysis
- 5.Findings
- 5.1Intensification strategies
- 5.2Intensification across rating valence
- 6.Discussion
- 7.Conclusions
-
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Cited by
Cited by 3 other publications
Feng, Wei & Wei Ren
2019.
“This is the destiny, darling”: Relational acts in Chinese management responses to online consumer reviews.
Discourse, Context & Media 28
► pp. 52 ff.

Ren, Wei
2023.
(Im)politeness in Online Consumer Reviews. In
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► pp. 167 ff.

Zhang, Yi & Wei Ren
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‘This is so skrrrrr’ – creative translanguaging by Chinese micro-blogging users.
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