Graduation within the Scope of Attitude in English and Spanish Consumer Reviews of Books and Movies

This chapter reports research on evaluative language in English and Spanish consumer-generated reviews on books and movies. Within the Appraisal framework, a contrastive study is carried out on the spans of Graduation embedded in spans of Attitude in 64 reviews. A qualitative analysis, covering a syntactic description of these expressions of Graduation and proposals for doubtful cases, is followed by a quantitative analysis based on the parameters of language, subtypes of Graduation, product evaluated and positive or negative evaluation. The results show that the overall distribution of the main subtypes of Graduation spans in the English and the Spanish reviews is similar, but the consideration of each parameter in detail uncovers a number of differences between the reviews written in the two languages. In particular, the results point to possible pervasive differences in the expression of Affect in English and Spanish.