“Best dentist ever” — evaluation strategies in the headlines of Danish and German positive online consumer reviews

Abstract

Over the last few decades, computer-mediated communication (CMC) has become a significant element of our reality and, subsequently, an item of interest for researchers within many disciplines. CMC’s rapid development has resulted in the emergence of new, multimodal means of expression, text genres, and communication styles. Among the new genres are online consumer reviews, which impact the behavior of online consumers to a large extent, but are also valuable for linguistic researchers due to their structure, content, and functions. The headlines of online consumer reviews seem to be of particular importance, although they have not received much attention in linguistic research so far. This paper offers a contrastive analysis of 200 headlines of positive online customer reviews for Danish and German dental care providers. Because of the way consumer reviews are displayed and consumed online, their headlines can be treated as separate texts and are analyzed as such throughout the paper. The investigation’s overall goal is twofold: (i) to identify the basic communicative functions of the headlines, and (ii) to describe the linguistic means employed to express those functions. The analysis seeks to find potential similarities and differences between the headlines of positive reviews written in Danish and German. The findings show that there is little variation between the two subsets of the analyzed corpus as far as communicative functions and employed linguistic means are concerned. This may indicate that the identified features could be treated as characteristic of the genre rather than language-specific.