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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

Linguistic variation in customer reviews

One’s own vs. another’s experience narrative

ORCID logo | Hebrew University of Jerusalem
ORCID logo | Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Informed by the framework of register analysis (Biber & Egbert 2018) and narrative analysis (Labov & Waletzky 1967), 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.

Keywords: register analysis, sub-register comparison, online registers, narrative composition, service experience narrative, customer review
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
Published online: 6 October 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rs.22004.ves
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