Speech Acts in Evaluative Online Discourse: Typology and Linguistic Manifestation

The paper focuses on categorizing speech acts found in evaluative discourse, specifically in the genre of online reviews. The study was based on the text corpus of reviews on private medical centers in Chelyabinsk. During the research, we divided statements of the online reviews into three groups: evaluative statements, motivations of evaluations, and contextual statements, and identified the typical speech acts associated with each group. The research also found that different types of speech acts are linked to the focus in the online discourse, which can be directed towards the addressee-consumer, the addressee-company, or the expression of the speaker’s thoughts and feelings. Through the research, cases of hybrid speech acts were identified and the types of speech acts prune to hybridization were determined. The outcome of the research is a classification for illocutionary acts in evaluative online discourse, which can be utilized as an annotation scheme for preparing data for training text understanding models.