From “Objective and very competent!! …Just as a doctor should be!!” to “An insult! Never again and not recommended.”

Linguistic insights into communicative actions in online doctor reviews: A German-Spanish language comparison

Abstract

The subject of this article is the communicative acting in the text type online doctor’s assessments from a linguistic and cultural comparative perspective. On the basis of a primarily qualitative study of 70 German and Spanish (peninsular) examples, insights into the macro- and microstructure of this text type will be provided on the one hand, and the linguistic design of the speech act of evaluation, which is constitutive for the text type, will be examined on the other. Furthermore, the linguistic configuration of the assessment of specific criteria such as competence and professionalism or empathy and friendliness of the staff of the surgery visited will be examined by applying corpus linguistic methods. In this context, insights will also be provided. Into the speech act types in which the evaluative verbal actions are embedded, as well as into the weighting of the respective criteria with additional consideration of further linguistic approaches, e.g. the functional sentence perspective. From a theoretical point of view, the article is thus committed to pragmalinguistic approaches of text linguistics as well as theoretical models such as the linguistic theory of politeness. The primarily qualitative study will be supplemented by occasional quantitative analyses in order to provide insights into the frequency and representativeness of the linguistic phenomena and strategies discussed.