Stages in an online review genre

Abstract

Genre, from the systemic functional linguistics point of view, refers to the organization of any speech activity in stages, determined by the overall purpose of the genre and by social conventions. In this paper, the SFL approach to genre and register is applied to the genre of online movie reviews. A corpus analysis shows specific stages in the genre: Descriptive stages (in turn, Subject Matter, Plot, Characters, and Background) and an obligatory Evaluation stage. Each stage is described in detail, in particular its characteristics and placement in the texts. We then turn to lexicogrammatical characteristics of the two main stages, showing that Description and Evaluation can be distinguished from each other using two features: evaluative words and connectives. Evaluation stages contain significantly more evaluative words. In terms of connectives, Description was shown to contain more temporal markers than Evaluation, whereas Evaluation contains more causal markers, indicating a basic distinction between narration (which tends to necessitate more temporal relations) and comment (which makes more use of cause, result, concession, condition, and contrast relations).