Lexical, syntactic and textual characteristics

For this week assignment we needed to pick a forum and analyze the comments’ textual, syntactic and lexical characteristics. Since our blog’s theme is traveling it felt natural to pick a forum focusing on that subject, and so we chose to focus on Tripadvisor and especially one particular hotel listed on the site, Santa Claus Holiday Village. Tripadvisor is a site dedicated to traveling; it’s a search engine of sorts, helping people find hotels, inns and flights at and to their chosen destinations. The site hosts over 200 million reviews, opinions and photos. Reviewers have to sign in to the site in order to leave a comment of their chosen location, either via their Facebook, Google+ or Samsung account, or by using the site’s own log in system. All comments and reviews are moderated and go through a screening process before published on the website, which normally takes about 24-48 hours.

Lexical characteristics found in the comments:

The language used in the comments was usually grammatically correct. However, we did find one acronym used (s.c. for Santa Claus) and one emoticon, :). There was also a comment left by the username username cherrywong: “The staffs r friendly n helpful”, which uses a few shortened words. All in all the user reviews were written in clean English.

We are all looking at you, cherrywong.

Syntactic characteristics found in the comments:

As stated above, the comments were in general very well written, people had clearly put in time and effort to give a rounded and well-supported opinion of the hotel. However, there were some comments that were lacking verbs or were using unnecessary dashes and dots, perhaps to emphasize their point or for stylistic reasons, such as one comment that read: “When in Roveniemi - especially winter time & Christmas - look no further. Little cabins beside Santas park & shops makes this a great stay! Especially for families. Where you can also find reindeers lurking, Santas post office & restaurants...a wonderful wonderful magical place! Some of our best memories were made here. Already planning to return :)”

Textual characteristics found in the comments:

Even though there was not much to be said of the comments in terms of syntactic and lexical characteristics, textual characteristics make up for them in great amounts. For example, multimodality could be seen on the site in terms of the stars used to grade the hotel for location, service, rooms, cleanliness and so on. The site also gives people titles in terms of how much they have contributed, which might add or reduce the value of the reviews left by said user. The people who have registered to the site also have personal profiles which could be seen as a way to create networked context.

Identification is mandatory on the site, but it does not mean you have to comment using your own name. Some people choose to use their real first name as a username, sometimes mixing in letters - e.g. Vicky75_11 - some prefer to use pseudonyms, for example “druindubai”. The commenters’ place of residence is also displayed.

The struggles of a Tripadvisor user.

The site system offered little in the terms of dialogue. The staff of the hotel could answer the questions and feedback left by the reviewers, and you can also ask more about the hotel from the people who’ve left comments. There is also an option to rate a review, which could be considered a dialogue of sorts.

As noted before the comments were well written, almost nobody used slang words etc. Humor and playful titles were used every now and then to emphasize the writers point, such as “I would have strangled an elf for a beer after 8pm”, "If heaven was a place on earth...”

Elves should never stand between a man and his beer.
- a Finnish proverb?

The reviewers also used a lot of emotional wordplay, trying to awake their feelings towards the hotel and their vacation through the restriction of 200 characters per comment. Titles such as “My winter wonderland”, “Happiest place on Earth”, “THE ONLY PLACE TO STAY WHEN IN ROVANIEMI” are thrown around in almost carefree manner, and comments ooze the same sort of high-spirited enthusiasm, for example one user commented “It's the most surreal place and I'm almost a believer now with all the Christmas magic I was exposed to!”.

That's it for the second assignment, was a lot of fun and a lot of work!

- JS