36.1095, Reviews: Changing Discursive Trends in the Online Review Genre: Dias (2025)

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Subject: 36.1095, Reviews: Changing Discursive Trends in the Online Review Genre: Dias (2025)

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Date: 31-Mar-2025
From: Dominique DIAS [Dominique.Dias at univ-grenoble-alpes.fr]
Subject: Pragmatics, Sociolinguistics: Dias (2025)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/35-3174

Title: Changing Discursive Trends in the Online Review Genre
Subtitle: A Cross-Linguistic Study of BlaBlaCar
Series Title: Utrecht Studies in Language and Communication
Publication Year: 2024

Publisher: Brill
           http://www.brill.com
Book URL: https://brill.com/display/title/69944

Author(s): María de la O Hernández-López

Reviewer: Dominique DIAS

SUMMARY
In her book “Changing discursive trends in the online review genre: a
cross-linguistic study of BlaBlaCar” María de la O Hernández-López
examines the discursive practices of online reviews in two different
countries: Spain and Great Britain. The author argues that a
cross-cultural or cross-linguistic study of the online review context
is necessary, as the affordances of digital communication may have
blurred some communicative differences between language and culture.
The book undertakes an examination of three discourse practices that
distinguish BlaBlaCar reviews from other business-to-person (B2P)
platforms (e.g., TripAdvisor): the expression of emotion, relatedness,
and metacommunication. By examining these practices, the author seeks
to understand the changing discursive trends in the online review
genre and whether culture has an impact on this affinity space. The
book is organized into theoretical chapters (Chapters 1–3), empirical
chapters (Chapters 4–7), and concluding remarks (Chapter 8).
In Chapter 1 “The evolution of online reviews”, María de la O
Hernández-López explores the evolution of online reviews and their
impact on consumers, businesses, and society. The chapter begins with
an explanation of how business-to-business (B2B) and
business-to-consumer (B2C) marketplaces have been replaced by
business-to-person (B2P) and peer-to-peer (P2P) models, which
incorporate online reviews as part of their marketing and selling
strategy. The author points out that electronic-word-of-mouth (eWOM),
defined as positive or negative statements made by potential, actual,
or former customers about a product or company, has emerged as a
potent process (Hennig-Thurau et al. 2004). This process not only
enhances a brand’s presence in search results but also increases its
visibility to new customers. The chapter also underscores the impact
of online communication on offline behavior, social interactions,
quality of life, and psychological well-being. The author notes that
anonymity, which was once a prevalent trend in the online world, has
declined, as the affordances of the most recent platforms, including
online customer reviews (OCRs), have adopted full identification of
their users prior to registration. Hernández-López goes on to discuss
the differences between B2P and P2P marketplaces, delineating online
peer reviews (OPRs) as a distinct category of reviews written by peers
about peers in the sharing economy of P2P platforms. The author notes
that, in contrast to the communication found in B2P marketplaces with
a strong offline-to-online trend, sharing economy platforms generate
online-offline-online directionality: individuals communicate online
in order to have an offline experience and then comment on that
offline experience online. The chapter concludes by discussing the
positivity bias in OPRs and the need for prosumers to be seen as
friendly, trustworthy, and authentic. The author posits that language
and discursive practices play a significant role in shaping the
specific features of OPRs and differentiating them from OCRs.
Chapter 2 “The cultural component in offline and online communication”
begins by discussing the notion of speech communities and the
necessity to examine discursive practices in BlaBlaCar from a
cross-cultural or cross-linguistic perspective. The objective is to
ascertain whether there are two distinct speech communities (in Spain
and in the UK) or if BlaBlaCar represents a global community. The
author then discusses some of the characteristics traditionally
associated with Spanish and British politeness, noting that Spanish
politeness is associated with involvement, directness, friendliness,
physical closeness, and enthusiasm shown in the ongoing process of
interaction (Hickey 2005), while British politeness is said to be more
reserved, indirect, formal, and conventionalized (Stewart 2005). The
chapter also underscores the paradigm shift that has taken place in
the study of politeness, with scholars arguing that a comprehensive
im-politeness model needs to be understood within particular social
practices or genres (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2010). In order to
analyze the cultural component of online communication in Spain and in
the UK, Hernández-López prefers to use the concept of “affinity space”
(Gee 2005), because it moves away from the connotations associated
with the term “community”, which can imply a sense of belonging and
close personal ties between people. Affinity space is a term used to
describe a place (in this case BlaBlaCar) where individuals connect
with others based on shared activities, interests, and objectives
primarily.
Chapter 3 “Changing discursive practices” constitutes the last
theoretical chapter of the study. It delves into the evolution of
users’ communication within digital affinity spaces, where language is
“emotionalized” (Zappettini et al. 2021) and most activities are
relationally driven. María de la O Hernández-López plans to examine
three aspects of discursive practices: emotive discursive practices,
relational practices and metacommunicative, and metapragmatic
practices. The author proposes a twofold classification of
“expressives”: emotive discourse is predominantly self-oriented and
reflects the reviewer’s emotional state, while relational discourse is
other-oriented and aims to make the addressee feel a certain way
(examples of relational discourse include speech acts such as
praising, recommending, thanking, greeting, etc.). The chapter also
discusses textese, a language variety that characterizes
computer-mediated-communication (CMC), and has been termed “textism”,
“textish”, “text speak”, and “techspeak”. Textese can be divided into
linguistic and contextual categories, with linguistic textese
referring to changes in spelling and contextual textese referring to
extra cues such as emoticons or exclamation marks that add emotional
content to the message. Finally, the chapter concludes with a
discussion of metacommunication and its connection to metapragmatics,
defined as speech about what language is doing in a particular social
context or the manifestation of speakers’ abilities to make judgments
of appropriateness.
In Chapter 4 “Data and methodology”, María de la O Hernández-López
describes in detail how she constructed the corpus and what aspects
she chose to analyze based on the existing literature. The author
extracted an initial corpus of 3,000 reviews, balancing the number of
reviews written by men and women and discarding the reviews in which
users acknowledged not being Spanish or British. After a manual
process, the final corpus comprised 2,000 reviews, 1,000 in Spanish
and 1,000 in English. The analysis of the data is based on
computer-mediated discourse analysis (CMDA), introduced by Herring
(2004), which combines empirical, textual observations with linguistic
theory. In other words, the author examines how text-based and other
online semiotic resources can enact specific social actions as part of
a larger social world. The data analysis followed three different
stages: in the first stage, the author used NVivo, a qualitative data
analysis software, to segment the reviews horizontally, dividing the
text into sequential unites of varying types and lengths, such as
speech acts, specific lexical choices, lexical chunks, sentence
patterns, extralinguistic cues, and any other iterative expressions
that might respond to specific patterns and discourse practices. In
the second stage, the author manually labeled the data to refine the
information provided in the reviews and categorize those units into
topics or practices. The recurrent discourse practices identified were
grouped into two broad categories: the “how”, which refers to the way
the information is presented, and the “what”, which refers to what is
said recurrently and how it forms a discourse practice. In the third
stage, the author interpreted the data that were not labeled in the
previous stages. This final stage ensured that the discourse practices
were examined in detail and that any new categories that were not
identified with NVivo through specific lexical or grammatical choices
were identified.
In Chapter 5 “Emotive practices”, the author argues that understanding
the construction of emotion in BlaBlaCar reviews is crucial as it
provides insight into the user’s intentions and identity. The use of
emotive practices, such as emotive cues and emotive metalanguage,
reflects the user’s satisfaction with the service provided, their
awareness of the driver as a reader of their review, and their
perceived honesty and trustworthiness. The author also observes that
emotion is achieved through a cumulative process. As readers of
reviews themselves, most reviewers tend to be unconsciously influenced
by herding behavior (Pettinger 2018) and perspective-taking (Kamoen et
al. 2015). Regarding cultural expressions of emotion, the author notes
some differences between the British and Spanish data sets. The
British data set is much more emotional than the Spanish data set,
with reviewers tending to draw a contrast between drivers, who are
praised profusely, and themselves, who may not have met expectations.
This contradicts previous studies that suggest Spanish interlocutors
tend to become more expressive and emotional when communicating with
their peers in offline settings.
In Chapter 6 “Relational practices”, Hernández-López highlights that
sociability often takes precedence over evaluation, with reviewers
expressing their sense of relatedness and sociability through the use
of second-person pronouns and by addressing both drivers and readers.
The exchange of interpersonal messages publicly can be more convincing
and persuasive than descriptive accounts or objective data on the
experience. The author identifies the main functions of addressing the
community of users as describing and/or praising, as well as
recommending, while the switch to addressing the driver is made in
order to thank, compliment, greet, or send best wishes, and express
their intention to repeat the experience. The author calls these
“relational speech acts”, which function as intensifiers of their
relationship in their reviews. The author also notes that speech acts
are used differently from the findings of previous research and
reviewers write encrypted messages or hints that are only fully
understood by drivers but not by others. This reveals that it is not
only evaluation that these reviews are aimed at, but also social
continuity via rapport-enhancing activities.
In Chapter 7 “Metacommunicative practices”, María de la O
Hernández-López focuses on what reviewers say about their interaction
with drivers. The author analyses three categories of labels: labels
about communication during the trip, labels about communication before
the trip and labels about the driver’s traits or communication skills.
Users often make metapragmatic comments about the drivers’ relational
skills and evaluate their appropriateness. She finds that while some
users describe communication in general terms (e.g., “good” or
“great”), others use more specific labels that refer to communication
that is thought-provoking, varied, and entertaining. She notes
cultural differences in metacommunicative practices, with British
users valuing thought-provoking, intelligent conversations more, while
Spanish users seek fun and interactive experiences. The Spanish group
is also more specific in their labeling, appreciating friendly,
polite, talkative, generous, and entertaining drivers. The British
group tends to be more general in their labelling, and providing less
personal information about the addressee.
In the last chapter “Discussion and conclusion”, the author summarizes
the findings of the study and discusses their implications. She
highlights that BlaBlaCar reviews are more emotionalized than reviews
on other platforms. The reviews are also more relational than
transactional: they should not be viewed as isolated units, but
represent an extension of the user’s experience. The author suggests
that the discourse practices found in Spanish and English reviews are
almost identical, but the English reviews are more emotionalized in
terms of both quantity and other discourse devices. The author also
notes that while OCRs are primarily transactional, OPRs are more
emotionally loaded and relationally driven. The author identifies
several factors that constrain the way users communicate in OPRs,
including the affordances of the site, the purpose of the affinity
space and genre, herding behavior, and the particularities of the
experience (traveling with strangers). She also notes that language in
BlaBlaCar is both predictable and rule-oriented, with individual
dynamics and platform particularities shaping communication. The
author suggests future paths of research, like exploring other
demographic variables, such as gender. She also proposes a
redefinition of OPRs as a subgenre of OCRs, given that they are
governed by different conventions.
EVALUATION
Hernández López’s study is a valuable contribution to the field of
discourse analysis and media linguistics, as it provides a
comprehensive analysis of the discursive practices of online reviews
in BlaBlaCar, a platform that has received little attention in
pragmatic studies. The author’s focus on cross-cultural variation and
the impact of digital communication on language and culture is
particularly noteworthy, as it highlights the need for further
research in this area.
The book is well structured, making the 160 pages an engaging and
effortless read. The author’s reasoning and argumentation are clear
and easy to follow, supported by a substantial secondary literature.
The empirical chapters are especially noteworthy, as they provide
detailed tables that include examples from the corpus, accompanied by
systematic analyses of the various aspects under study.
The author excels at identifying the unique characteristics of
BlaBlaCar reviews as online peer reviews that structure the platforms
of the sharing economy, as explored in Chapter 1. However, contrary to
what the title of the book might suggest, it does not aim to theorize
discursive change. The issue of linguistic change in this study is
primarily addressed in terms of platform affordances and the evolution
of economic practices. In this sense, the study effectively
illustrates, albeit without explicitly stating it, one of the
characteristics of digital discourse, which is more influenced by the
medium and the communication platform. To truly understand the changes
in a discursive genre, one would need to adopt a broader perspective,
comparing different types of reviews and different eras to paint a
comprehensive picture of this discourse tradition and understand its
complexities. Nevertheless, this study and the methodology employed by
the author undoubtedly provide a solid foundation and an excellent
starting point.
A significant strength of the study lies in its examination of the
connection between online peer reviews and social media publications.
The author highlights the evolution of the notion of social media:
initially defined as online information created and shared by
consumers or users, social media publications now encompass a variety
of online word-of-mouth sites, such as blogs, discussion boards, or
forums. More recently, digital use trends have associated social media
with platforms where users interact with both familiar and unfamiliar
individuals for the primary purposes of socializing and sharing
information. The primary distinction is that eWOM via social media
sites is considerably more dynamic; content can be modified and edited
multiple times, interactions are unlimited, and audiovisual material
can accompany text-based content. In contrast, the affordances of the
OCRs are more limited. The transactional nature of OCR exchanges,
involving interactions that can only be understood by the driver and
the user, serves to blur the boundaries between BlaBlaCar reviews and
social media platforms.
This study excels in its valuable contrastive analysis of digital
discourse. By exploring the differences in discursive practices
between Spanish and British users, the author provides a nuanced
understanding of how digital discourse is shaped by cultural and
linguistic contexts. This study perfectly illustrates the importance
of considering social practices within specific genres. The thorough
examination of these aspects makes this study a precious resource for
understanding the complexities of online communication across
different cultures.
REFERENCES
Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, Pilar. 2010. A genre approach to the study of
im-politeness. International review of pragmatics 2. 46–94.
Gee, James Paul. 2005. Semiotic social spaces and affinity spaces:
from the age of mythology to today’s schools. In David Barton & Karin
Tusting (eds.), Beyond communities of practice. 214–234. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Henning-Thurau, Thorsten, Kevin P. Gwinner, Gianfranco Walsh & Dwayne
D. Gremler. 2004. Electronic word-of-mouth via consumer opinion
platforms: what motivates consumers to articulate themselves on the
internet? Journal of interactive marketing 18. 38–52.
Herring, Susan. 2004. Computer-mediated discourse analysis: an
approach to researching online behavior. In Sasha Barab, Rob King &
James H. Gray (eds.), Designing for virtual communities in the service
of learning. 338–276. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hickey, Leo. 2005. Politeness in Spain: thanks but no ‘thanks’. In Leo
Hickey & Miranda Stewart (eds.), Politeness in Europe. 317–330.
Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Kamoen, Naomi, Maris B.J. Mos & Willen Dekker. 2015. A hotel that is
not bad isn’t good. The effects of valence framing and expectation in
online reviews on text, the reviewer and product appreciation. Journal
of pragmatics 75 (1). 28–43.
Pettinger, Tejvan. 2018. Herding behavior. Ecomomics Help.
https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/137494/concepts/herding-behaviour/(12
February, 2025).
Stewart, Miranda. 2005. Politeness in Britain: ‘It’s only a
suggestion…’. In Leo Hickey & Miranda Stewart (eds.), Politeness in
Europe. 116–129. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Zapettini, Franco, Douglas Mark Ponton & Tatiana V. Larina. 2021.
Emotionalisation of contemporary media discourse: A research agenda.
Russian journal of linguistics 25 (3). 586–610.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Dominique Dias teaches Germanic Linguistics at Sorbonne University,
France. He is a member of the research group CELISO, which brings
together researchers specializing in the Germanic, English,
Scandinavian, and Slavic languages. His research interests lie in text
linguistics, text genres, metadiscourses and German media.



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