Modifications in Chinese online consumer reviews
07/03/2019 (Thursday) 13:00-14:00 E21B-G002
With the increasing popularity of online shopping among consumers and the continuous development of interactive digital communication, online reviews are prevalent in contemporary life. As a new genre, online reviews deserve more attention in language and discourse studies. Existing studies in this field predominantly investigate online reviews in English. More research on a greater variety of languages is needed to better understand the linguistic features of this genre and the localization of the social practice. In addition, how consumers modify their evaluations lacks systemic exploration. In this talk, I will provide an analysis of modification strategies in Chinese consumer reviews, based on a dataset of user-generated online comments on Kindle E-Reader collected from Amazon China. The talk will examine the usage and frequency of different types of modification devices in the reviews. The distribution of modification is further investigated and discussed against the positive or negative nature of the comments.
Professor Wei Ren currently works at the School of Foreign Languages, Beihang University, Beijing, China. Wei’s research interests include Second Language Pragmatics, Pragmatics, and Second Language Research. He has also published widely on Chinese Internet and Social Media communication and recently published a Guest Edited Special Issue on Chinese Digital Media in the SSCI journal Discourse, Context and Media (2018).