Loving and hating the movies in English, German and Spanish

We present a quantitative analysis of evaluative language in a genre in which it is particularly prominent, that of movie reviews. The data chosen are nonprofessional consumer-generated reviews written in English, German and Spanish. The reviews are analyzed in terms of the categories of Attitude and Graduation within the Appraisal framework (Martin & White, 2005). The results show a clear influence of the genre on the relative frequency of the different types of Appraisal categories. This influence accounts for a number of the similarities found in the evaluative expression across the three languages, such as the predominance of Appreciation over other Appraisal categories, and the relation between the global positive or negative polarity of the reviews and the individual polarity of the spans in the reviews. We also found cross-linguistic differences, for example, those related to word order and argumentative style.