“I would never take my pet to someone I didn’t trust…”: A cross cultural analysis of evaluative language in English and Italian reviews of veterinary clinics
In today’s digital society, online tools for expressing evaluative feedback have become integral to nearly every aspect of our lives. So much so that consumers and clients are often referred to as ‘prosumers,’ capable of influencing the future decisions of their peers through web reviews (Vásquez, 2014). All businesses with an online presence are consequently impacted by digital reviews and should recognize their potential as digital marketing tools, including building credibility and trust (Liu et al., 2020). This significance is particularly pronounced when the reviewed product or service pertains to health, encompassing not only our well-being but also that of our families, including pets, of which they are more and more becoming an integral part. Against this backdrop, the present contribution aims to conduct a corpus-assisted study of positive and negative reviews of Italian and British veterinary clinics, with a specific focus on how the two different “linguacultures” express positive and negative evaluations. This study will be carried out through a self-compiled corpus of 5-star (positive) and 1-star (negative) Google reviews of veterinary clinics in the three most populated cities in England and Italy. The corpus comprises 43,412 reviews and 1,569,484 word tokens for the English component and 16,921 reviews and 532,912 words for the Italian component. Evaluative language will be examined using corpus linguistic methodologies (Hunston, 2011) and through the lens of Martin and White’s (2005) taxonomy of “attitude” within the appraisal theory framework. The goal is to explore whether differences in the expression of praises and compliments in positive reviews and complaints and criticisms in negative ones are evident between English and Italian reviews.
References
Hunston, S. (2010). Corpus Approaches to Evaluation: Phraseology and Evaluative Language, London and New York: Routledge.
Liu, Z., Lei, S., Guo, Y. and Zhou, Z. (2020) The interaction effect of online review language style and product type on consumers’ purchase intentions. Palgrave Communication 6 [11], available at: <https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-0387-6>
Martin, J.R., and P. White. (2005). The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Vásquez, C. (2014) The Discourse of Online Consumer Reviews. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic.