Cover not available
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
References (41)
References
Anderson, E. T., & Simester, D. I. (2014). Reviews without a purchase: Low ratings, loyal customers, and deception. Journal of Marketing Research, 51 (3), 249–269. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baker, P., Brookes, G., & Evans, C. (2019). The language of patient feedback: A corpus linguistic study of online health communication. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Besnier, N. (1988). The linguistic relationships of spoken and written Nukulaelae registers. Language, 64 (4), 707–736. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Biber, D. (1988). Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Biber, D., & Conrad, S. (2019). Register, genre, and style (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Biber, D., & Egbert, J. (2018). Register variation online. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Braid, D. (1996). Personal narrative and experiential meaning. The Journal of American Folklore, 109 (431), 5–30. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brezina, V. (2018). Statistics in corpus linguistics: A practical guide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2020). Classical monofactorial (parametric and non-parametric) tests. In M. Paquot & S. Th. Gries (Eds.), A practical handbook of corpus linguistics (pp. 474–504). Cham: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brookes, G., McEnery, T., McGlashan, M., Smith, G., & Wilkinson, M. (2022). Narrative evaluation in patient feedback: A study of online comments about UK healthcare services. Narrative Inquiry, 32 (1), 9–35. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bruner, J. (1991). The narrative construction of reality. Critical Inquiry, 18 (1), 1–21. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cobb, T., & Boulton, A. (2015). Classroom applications of corpus analysis. In D. Biber & R. Reppen (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of English corpus linguistics (pp. 478–497). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cohen, J. (1988). Statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
De Fina, A. (2021). Doing narrative analysis from a narratives-as-practices perspective. Narrative Inquiry, 31 (1), 49–71. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
De Fina, A., & Georgakopoulou, A. (2008). Analyzing narratives as practices. Qualitative Research, 8 (3), 379–387. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gray, B., & Biber, D. (2012). Current conceptions of stance. In K. Hyland & C. S. Guinda (Eds.), Stance and voice in written academic genres (pp. 15–33). London: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hooley, G., Piercy, N., Nicoulaud, B., & Rudd, J. (2017). Marketing strategy and competitive positioning (6th ed.). Harlow: Pearson Education Limited.Google Scholar
Jurafsky, D., Chahuneau, V., Routledge, B. R., & Smith, N. A. (2014). Narrative framing of consumer sentiment in online restaurant reviews. First Monday, 19 (4). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Labov, W. (1997). Some further steps in narrative analysis. Journal of Narrative and Life History, 7 (1–4), 395–415. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2006). Narrative pre-construction. Narrative Inquiry, 16 (1), 37–45. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Labov, W., & Waletzky, J. (1967). Narrative analysis. In J. Helm (Ed.), Essays on the verbal and visual arts (pp. 12–44). Seattle/London: University of Washington Press.Google Scholar
Lemon, K. N., & Verhoef, P. C. (2016). Understanding customer experience throughout the customer journey. Journal of Marketing, 80 (6), 69–96. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Leung, K. K., Silvius, J. L., Pimlott, N., Burd Dalziel, W., & Drummond, N. (2009). Why health expectations and hopes are different: The development of a conceptual model. Health Expectations, 12 (4), 347–360. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lui, M., & Baldwin, T. (2012). Langid.py: An off-the-shelf language identification tool. Proceedings of the ACL 2012 system demonstrations (pp. 25–30). Jeju Island: Association for Computational Linguistics.Google Scholar
McDonald, M., & Dunbar, I. (2004). Market segmentation: How to do it, how to profit from it. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann.Google Scholar
McKinney, W. (2010). Data Structures for Statistical Computing in Python. In S. van der Walt & J. Millman (Eds.), Proceedings of the 9th Python in Science Conference (pp. 56–61). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Montani, I., Honnibal, M., Honnibal, H., Van Landeghem, S., Boyd, A., Peters, H., Samsonov, M., Geovedi, J., O’Leary McCann, P., Regan, J., Orosz, G., Altinok, D., Lind Kristiansen, S., Roman Fiedler, L., Howard, G., Phatthiyaphaibun, W., Tamura, Y., Bozek, S., Amery, M., Böing, B., Kumar Tippa, P., Vogelsang, L. U. Ramanan Balakrishnan, Mazaev, V., Dubbin, G., Fukumaru, J., & Henry, W. (2019). explosion/spaCy: v2.1.7: Improved evaluation, better language factories and bug fixes (Version v2.1.7). Zenodo.Google Scholar
Montgomery, G. H., David, D., DiLorenzo, T., & Erblicha, J. (2003). Is hoping the same as expecting? Discrimination between hopes and response expectancies for nonvolitional outcomes. Personality and Individual Differences, 35 (2), 399–409. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mushin, I. (2011). Remembering another’s experience: Epistemological stance and evaluation in narrative retelling. In H. Pishwa (Ed.), Language and memory: Aspects of knowledge representation (pp. 387–408). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar
Ni, J., Li, J., & McAuley, J. (2019). Justifying recommendations using distantly-labeled reviews and fine-grained aspects. Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), 188–197. Hong Kong: Association for Computational Linguistics. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Patterson, W. (2013). Narratives of events: Labovian narrative analysis and its limitations. In Doing narrative research (2nd ed., pp. 27–46). London: SAGE Publications. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Prugsamatz, S., Pentecost, R., & Ofstad, L. (2006). The influence of explicit and implicit service promises on Chinese students’ expectations of overseas universities. Asia Pacific Journal of Marketing and Logistics, 18 1, 129–145. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rusticus, S. A., & Lovato, C. Y. (2014). Impact of sample size and variability on the power and type I error rates of equivalence tests: A simulation study. Practical Assessment, Research and Evaluation, 19 1. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schoenmueller, V., Netzer, O., & Stahl, F. (2020). The polarity of online reviews: Prevalence, drivers and implications. Journal of Marketing Research, 57 (5), 853–877. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
The Pandas development team. (2020). Pandas-dev/pandas: pandas (Version 1.4.2). Zenodo. Retrieved from DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vallat, R. (2018). Pingouin: Statistics in Python. Journal of Open Source Software, 3 (31), 1026. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Van De Mieroop, D. (2021). The Narrative Dimensions Model and an exploration of various narrative genres. Narrative Inquiry, 31 (1), 4–27. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vásquez, C. (2012). Narrativity and involvement in online consumer reviews: The case of TripAdvisor. Narrative Inquiry, 22 1, 105–121. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2014a). The discourse of online consumer reviews. London: Bloomsbury Academic.Google Scholar
(2014b). ‘Usually not one to complain but…’: Constructing identities in user-generated online reviews. In P. Seargeant & C. Tagg (Eds.), The language of social media: Identity and community on the Internet (pp. 65–90). London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Voorhees, C. M., Fombelle, P. W., Gregoire, Y., Bone, S., Gustafsson, A., Sousa, R., & Walkowiak, T. (2017). Service encounters, experiences and the customer journey: Defining the field and a call to expand our lens. Journal of Business Research, 79 1, 269–280. DOI logoGoogle Scholar