Our team member Karolina Ryker has published a new paper “Professional vs. consumer discourse communities: Comparative genre analysis of online music reviews” in ELAD-SILDA Études de Linguistique et d’Analyse des Discours – Studies in Linguistics and Discourse Analysis. In the paper, professional and consumer online music reviews are compared in terms of their rhetorical structure, i.e., segments that the texts consist of. The smallest communicative units (microunits) are referred to as steps. They can then be grouped into larger units (macrounits) which are termed as moves. The corpus includes 100 online music reviews from two websites, namely Pitchfork (professional reviews) and Rate Your Music (consumer reviews). The research questions guiding the study are as follows: What is the rhetorical structure of expert and lay digital album reviews? What are the interfaces, interactions and differences between expert and lay discourse communities? The results show that there is a higher share of descriptive segments in critic reviews and a higher share of evaluative text segments in consumer reviews. Consumer reviews are emotional word‑of‑mouth recommendations, whereas professional ones offer broader contextual information. This is due to the fact that critics are expected to act as a bridge between the artist and the audience by explaining art, apart from merely evaluating it. However, some consumers emulate the structure of professional critic reviews.
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