Intercultural rhetoric on the internet: A study of evaluation in hotel reviews

• Main Author: Tian, Youfei
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2011
• Subjects: Hotels > Reviews > Evaluation; Cross-cultural studies; Linguistics
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_doctoral/304; https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/context/etd_doctoral/article/1303/viewcontent/CDTG004971_P.pdf
• Institution: De La Salle University

Hotel reviews are texts written and posted on travel websites by travel customers as evaluations of the hotels where they have stayed. As an individual actor behavior, hotel reviews play an increasingly important role in the communication between travel service providers and their consumers considering that more and more travel booking transactions are being conducted through exponentially emerging travel websites. However, little has been known about the ways in which travel customers evaluate hotel features under such CMC circumstances. The present study attempts to explore, along the cultural dimension of directness vs. indirectness, whether American and Chinese travel customers tend to converge or diverge in their evaluative behavior at both macro- and micro-levels. Through an analysis of 300 hotel reviews, the study found that both American and Chinese travel customers tend to converge at both levels while each group displays a state of complexity and multiplicity in their ways of evaluation. However, for each cultural group, such convergence does not show a definite trend towards either directness or indirectness on the whole. This might suggest that hotel reviews, so far as evaluation is concerned, have their indigenous rhetorical and linguistic practices in cyberspace, which may not act heavily upon the national cultures of the travel customers. To a considerable extent, the overall convergence between American and Chinese travel customers forms a point of contention relative to the literature in the field of contrastive rhetoric, rendering in some way non-pertinent the bipolarized projection of a national culture onto the rhetorical and linguistic practices of a particular group of people in a particular context. The model proposed by the present study can be replicated to examine the ways of evaluation in other similar text types on the Internet.