A Corpus Based Study: Analysis of the Positive Reviews of Amazon.com Users

Lokman Altun

Abstract


This study aims to investigate online consumer reviews on Amazon.com. Thanks to this study, learners can make use of this study when they prefer a corpus based learning strategy especially for the product reviewers. This study includes two aspects of review structure. The frequency of adverbs, adjectives and verbs that are mostly used together are main focus in this study. Adjectives and adverbs that are used more and which collocations are used more with that adjective and adverbs were examined. In addition, it was examined which verbs are used mostly when people try to show their phrases. This study is quantitative study with survey design. In order to collect data, different Apple products were analyzed such as iPhone 7, Apple Watch 1 and Apple Watch Series 3, Apple Airpods. An analysis of 1,587 reviews which were 4 or 5 stars from Amazon.com across four products pointed out that online consumer reviews have a very effective role in terms of the sales of products. To assure the validity and reliability of the process, a teacher who has a very good knowledge about linguistic checked reviews and came to an agreement with the researcher. Descriptive analysis was used in this study by calculating frequency of adverbs, adjectives and verbs. It was found out that consumers generally prefer specific verbs, adverbs and adjectives in a specific context. This study may help to understand the linguistic background of consumers. As a result of the study, it was seen that some adjectives, adverbs and verbs were mostly chosen deliberately by the users. This study also resulted that these words have some specific collocation words. These collocation words were used by the users both before and after that adjective, adverb and verb. As an implication for this study, new writing topics that this study has suggested can be integrated to the curriculum. These topics can be seen as a new way for writing lessons.

Keywords


Consumer Reviews, Corpus-based Study, Real Life English, English in Use, Comment Analysis

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References


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DOI: https://doi.org/10.7575/aiac.alls.v.10n.1p.123

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