A Comparative Study On The Use Of Boosters And Hedges In English And Chinese Online Consumer Reviews

Booster and hedge,as two opposites of epistemic markers,are widely used in interpersonal communication to modify the commitment of an utterance.Previous studies primarily focused on the features of their use within English or Chinese academic writings,dialects,or emails.Due to the globally numerous users of English and Chinese,many studies explored booster and hedge used in English or Chinese,including comparisons between the two languages.Considering the growing importance of online shopping platforms and consumer reviews in people's daily life,increasing attention has been drawn by online consumer reviews as a form of language discourse.However,it remains less well studied how booster and hedge are used on the online shopping platforms operating for English and Chinese language speakers.To further address this issue,the current study compares booster and hedge between English and Chinese online consumer reviews.This study identified three models of laptops under different brands being sold at the same period of time on Amazon America and JD China,and collected the latest 100 validated reviews of each product in both online platforms.Then English and Chinese comparable subcorpora were separately constructed and the data were collected and analyzed.Based on Brown and Levinson's Politeness Theory,this study compared the use of boosters and hedges between English and Chinese consumer reviews,and tried to answer the two following questions:1)Are there any differences/similarities in the use of boosters and hedges between English and Chinese online consumer reviews?2)What factors contribute to the different use of boosters and hedges between English and Chinese online consumer reviews?It was discovered that boosters and hedges in English and Chinese reviews were used differently.The results showed that English consumers preferred more genres of modal auxiliaries,epistemic verbs,epistemic adjectives/adverbs as hedges;fewer genres of subcategories including modal auxiliaries,epistemic adjectives/adverbs as boosters.By contrast,Chinese consumers almost only preferred genres of modal auxiliaries and epistemic adjectives/adverbs as hedges.It was also found that Chinese modal auxiliaries could have multiple English equivalents;English modal auxiliary could express different hedging degrees in past/present tense.The different impacts of negative or positive ratings in the English and Chinese consumer reviews were also identified that American consumers used far more hedges in negative reviews than in positive reviews;and boosters were used more frequently in positive reviews than in negative reviews.In Chinese reviews,although not statistically more significant than in the English reviews,hedges were also used more in negative reviews than in positive reviews;and boosters were used slightly more in negative reviews than in positive reviews.Finally,divergent registers in English and Chinese reviews were found as a possible linguistic explanation of the different use of boosters and hedges in the two languages.This study reflects the different uses of boosters and hedges in English and Chinese consumer reviews,and contributes to the literature comparing boosters and hedges among different languages.