Linguistic variation in customer reviews

Abstract Informed by the framework of register analysis ( Biber & Egbert 2018 ) and narrative analysis (Labov & Waletzky 1967 ), this paper studies customer reviews of assistive reading devices to identify intra-register variation between narratives of one’s own and another’s experience. The lexico-grammatical features differentiating the two experience types include the use of pronouns, references to animate and inanimate entities, patterns of user and product description, stance markers, negation, as well as expectation- and transaction-related lemmas. The study reveals that the distribution of these features is determined by the narrative ownership and the associated distinctions in expectations. Furthermore, the difference in narrative ownership results in variation with respect to the experience narrative composition.