Language Peculiarities of Positive and Negative Reviews of Russian Hotels (as Exemplified on TripAdvisor)

The study is devoted to detecting language peculiarities of positive and negative online reviews which are becoming more popular among people who deal with the Internet. This is why many scientists of different fields have been professionally interested in the topic. At the first stage of research the two kinds of reviews were analyzed by chosen parameters in order to build a classification on the base of review language markers as the ultimate result. It turned out that the language peculiarities of positive and negative reviews were identical, however, they are still can be distinguished by some parameters. Furthermore, at the second stage positive and negative reviews were explored on the subject of methods of emotion expression which people use in texts most frequently. The results achieved showed that epithets, emotive vocabulary and exclamative sentences were the most popular forms of demonstrating emotional state. After that, at the third stage of study the intent analysis was conducted to determine kinds of argumentation used by authors of online reviews. And it was learned that people, while writing both positive and negative reviews, tend to use positioning strategy within rational type and conversational turn “appeal to addressee’s desire/dream/interest” within emotional type. Then, at the next stage there was made an attempt to identify which kind of reviews – positively or negatively coloured – contains more spelling mistakes, and this analysis showed that negative emotions have a bad effect on the number of mistakes in texts. And at the final stage the same analysis was carried out for “masculine” and “feminine” reviews that resulted in determination that men made more mistakes as opposed to women. Although no significant difference in the language peculiarities of the two considered types of reviews were noticed, in present work there was taken a step to study a new Internet genre “tourist review”.