AN ANALYSIS OF MOVE STRUCTURES IN ENGLISH MOVIE REVIEWS APPEARING ON TWO WEBSITES

Abstract

Since online websites create new environments and change contexts of communication, social media have been popular sources for different forms of free expression. Among many sources, online movie reviews are important sources of information for decision-making among moviegoers. However, little is known about how online movie reviews are written and structured.

The present study focused on examining move structures used in English movie reviews appearing on two online websites. Two groups of the corpus were taken from Rottentomatoes and IMDb and consisted of 30 movie reviews taken from these two websites during the years of 2011- 2020. De Jong and Burger's (2013) rhetorical move model was used for the data analysis in this study.

The results showed that the top three of the most frequent rhetorical moves on both websites – Giving criticism followed by Describing the movie, and Giving practical information respectively. Also, it was found that Placing the movie in context, and Recommending the movie to the reader on both websites were rarely used. Finally, there were similarities of Giving Criticisms, which is the most frequently found in English movie reviews on both websites.

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