{"word_count": 844, "character_count": 5423}
The author of this post is Julia Mizerski, a B.A. student of English Studies at the University of Bonn, who has written an excellent term paper in the course “The Pragmatics of Digital Communication” (Dr. Stefanie Pohle) in the summer term 2018.Have you ever watched a movie after reading a veryconvincing review? Or have you ever wondered how a reviewer manages to get youexcited about a movie? Well, I did, and so I chose to explore how the comment “SweetChrist this was good” on the movie “Brawl in Cell Block 99” (2017) can get meto watch a movie.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hfAExhHTMMIt isn’t really that hard to come up with a research question that combines one of your passions with linguistics (that is, if linguistics isn’t already your passion). After all, everything is connected to language somehow. As my passion, besides linguistics of course, are movies, I wondered: Do reviews for different movie genres differ from each other? So, to be more precise, I tried to find out whether reviews of the drama “Professor Marston and the Wonder Women” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r991pr4Fohk) differ from reviews of the action movie “Brawl in Cell Block 99” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hfAExhHTMM).https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r991pr4FohkFor this analysis, which was for a term paper in mylinguistics class, I focussed on how reviewers recommend that the reader ofthis review watch a particular movie. In order to analyse these recommendations,I sorted the reviews into different categories. This was important, because notall recommendations look the same. While some are very direct (e.g. “watchit”), others can be very subtle (e.g. “it was so refreshing”).The collection of reviews that I had a look at (whichis called my “dataset”) were taken from “letterboxd” (https://letterboxd.com/). This is a website whichlets its users rate and review movies. As I was looking for recommendations, Iselected only positive reviews for the two movies I wanted to focus on.However, these were still too many, so I ended up selecting 50 reviews for myanalysis by using a random number generator (https://www.random.org/). This is a tool that canhelp with the selection process by letting chance decide which cases to choose,so that you as a researcher don’t accidentally prefer one kind of reviews overothers.Working with my dataset looked like this: Thecategorization system I chose included different categories of recommendations.I went through all 50 reviews, looked for phrases that could be seen as recommendations,and put each recommendation in a fitting category of that system. The most important recommendation strategies in mycategorisation system were direct and indirect recommendations, which both splitup into smaller categories again. The direct category included examples thatwere, as the name already suggests, very direct. If somebody wrote “see thisfilm” in their review, this would be the category for it. The indirect categoryhowever includes mostly hints. An example for this would be the description ofa movie as “incredible” in a review.To show you an example, here is a review I analysed:I decided to classify “This gem of a film flew under the radar in 2017” as a recommendation, and more precisely, as an indirect one, because the reviewer doesn’t tell the reader directly that they recommend the movie.After sorting through all 50 reviews like this, Ilooked at how many recommendations made up each of the categories in my system.What was surprising was that an overwhelming amount of the recommendations fellinto the indirect category, which mainly consisted of strong and mild hints.Here are someof the recommendations I classified as strong hints: “absolutely phenomenal”,“a wonder, truly”, “what a great film”, “a satisfying, bloody good time”. The followingrecommendations, on the other hand, were seen as mild hints: “This is a breathof fresh air”, “I’m so invested”, “I am genuinely so overwhelmed”, “I couldeasily watch this again tonight”.Now thedifference between these categories might be hard to spot, so here comes alittle more explanation. Strong hints were mostly positive words – words thatcan be seen as positive even in another context (e.g. “phenomenal”). Mild hintson the other hand refer to personal evaluations of the movie. Just becausesomeone is “overwhelmed” by a movie, that doesn’t mean you would be, too.Still, the reviewer tells us that they think the movie is good, so it’s a hint,just not a strong one.So what did my analysis show? Well, mainly that peoplelike to use strongly positive words for recommending a movie no matter if it’sa drama or an action film. If someone tells you that a film is “great”,“amazing” or “wonderful”, they might want you to watch it. When it comes tomild hints though, the reviews for the drama are quite far ahead and reviewerstell you that they loved the film and even use heart-emojis. Reviewers of theaction movie don’t do that very much – or at all. Here’s the gist of it: People writing movie reviewsdon’t seem to be very comfortable giving direct recommendations like “Go seethis fucking film”, they rather use hints. And if you look very closely, youmight even find differences in how people use hints to recommend specificmovies. To come back to my initial question how a reviewer manages to get meexcited about a movie: a hint such as “Sweet Christ this was good” definitelydoes the job of a recommendation.