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Aggravated impoliteness in Chinese online negative restaurant reviews

  • Xiaoyu Lai

    Xiaoyu Lai, is a faculty member in the School of Foreign Languages, Guangdong University of Technology, China. Her research interests include linguistic (im)politeness, language aggression and intercultural communication.

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Published/Copyright: September 25, 2023

Abstract

This paper examines aggravated impoliteness in online restaurant reviews, with a dataset consisting of 92 negative reviews from the Chinese-based website Dazhongdianping. It first analyzes the usage and frequency of different types of aggravated impoliteness strategies. The topic categories of the review samples are then investigated, and the connection between these two aspects is further discussed. The variety of aggravated impoliteness strategies includes: preceding intensifiers, indignant exclamations, unpalatable questions, emoji, postpositional intensifiers, unfavorable comparisons, emphatic structure and taboo words, in decreasing order of frequency. These strategies are employed in connection with the ratings of: food, service, general experience, interpersonal judgments, price and environment. This study contributes to the impoliteness research by investigating the aggravated impoliteness in Chinese online data, and also enriches and provides insights into research on the genre of online consumer reviews.


Corresponding author: Xiaoyu Lai, School of Foreign Languages, Guangdong University of Technology, Guangzhou 510006, China, E-mail:

Funding source: Guangdong Provincial Philosophy and Social Science Planning Program

Award Identifier / Grant number: GD21CWY11

About the author

Xiaoyu Lai

Xiaoyu Lai, is a faculty member in the School of Foreign Languages, Guangdong University of Technology, China. Her research interests include linguistic (im)politeness, language aggression and intercultural communication.

  1. Research funding: This study has been supported by the project (No. GD21CWY11) on online reviews funded by Guangdong Provincial Philosophy and Social Science Planning Program.

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Received: 2022-06-17
Accepted: 2023-05-08
Published Online: 2023-09-25
Published in Print: 2024-07-26

© 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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