The Discourse of Online Reviews is the first book to provide an account of the discursive, pragmatic and rhetorical features of this rapidly growing form of technologically-mediated communication. Examining a corpus of over 1,000 consumer reviews, Camilla Vásquez explores many of the discourse features that are characteristic of this new, user-generated, computer-mediated and primarily text-based genre. She investigates the language used by reviewers as they forge connections with their audiences to draw them into their stories, as they construct their expertise and authority on various subjects and as they evaluate and assess their consumer experiences. She also demonstrates how reviewers display their awareness about emerging conventions of the very genre in which they are participating. This book adopts an eclectic approach to the analysis of discourse, and explores topics such as evaluation, identity and intertextuality as they occur in online reviews of hotels, restaurants, recipes, films and other consumer products.

The Discourse of Online Reviews is the first book to provide an account of the discursive, pragmatic and rhetorical features of this rapidly growing form of technologically-mediated communication. Examining a corpus of over 1,000 consumer reviews, Camilla Vásquez explores many of the discourse features that are characteristic of this new, user-generated, computer-mediated and primarily text-based genre. She investigates the language used by reviewers as they forge connections with their audiences to draw them into their stories, as they construct their expertise and authority on various subjects and as they evaluate and assess their consumer experiences. She also demonstrates how reviewers display their awareness about emerging conventions of the very genre in which they are participating. This book adopts an eclectic approach to the analysis of discourse, and explores topics such as evaluation, identity and intertextuality as they occur in online reviews of hotels, restaurants, recipes, films and other consumer products.

Language, Creativity and Humour Online offers new insights into the creative linguistic practices found in diverse digital contexts, such as social media platforms. It introduces new digital genres and contexts, expanding existing research on computer mediated communication (CMC) and covering key concepts in research on linguistic creativity. The book presents original linguistic analyses of a variety of digital genres, including: • Novelty Twitter accounts and political humour • Tumblr Chats • Amazon review parodies. This timely book uncovers the linguistic and interactional mechanisms underlying various types of creative, playful, and humorous texts online. It is essential reading for students and researchers working in the areas of language and media, and language and communication.

The present handbook provides an overview of the pragmatics of language and language use mediated by digital technologies. Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is defined to include text-based interactive communication via the Internet, websites and other multimodal formats, and mobile communication. In addition to 'core' pragmatic and discourse-pragmatic phenomena the chapters cover pragmatically-focused research on types of CMC and pragmatic approaches to characteristic CMC phenomena.

This volume aims to stretch the boundaries of text and discourse linguistics, exploring organization and structuring in discourse across a variety of communication forms, from written to spoken to visual, in old and new media. It presents a collection of case studies ranging in focus from the micro-level discourse functions of pronouns and emojis, to the macro-level structure of online interaction, all from their different perspectives drawing inspiration from the notion of text as structure and process. In a world of proliferating media and discourse types, the papers collected here reflect the latest scholarship in text and discourse studies, highlighting the value of combining multiple approaches and suggesting future directions and possibilities for research. Structures in Discourse will be of interest to students and researchers in pragmatics, discourse analysis, media studies and digitally mediated communication.

The interest in computer-mediated communication (CMC) has vastly risen over the recent years. Nevertheless, crosscultural differences in CMC have received little attention so far, especially with regard to complaining behaviour. This book therefore contributes to this still unexplored research area by comparing British English and German complaints in CMC, precisely on eBay. The empirical study statistically analyses online complaints taken from the feedback forum of this online auction house and shows both similarities and differences in the way speakers of the two cultures formulate their online complaints. Additionally, the impact the specific online context may have on users’ speech act performance is reviewed. Given that cultural differences may lead to misunderstandings in cross-cultural electronic communicative situations, this book is not only of interest to different fields of pragmatics, but also to e-commerce and is hence of economic interest.