Hypotheses of analysis on the stylistics of arguments: a case study from Trip Advisor

User generated content and eWOM (Electronic Word Of Mouth) on travel related information are increasingly widespread online practices from which travelers take advantage of (Gretzel & Yoo, 2008). Travelers' reviews are based on persuasive arguments aimed at convincing other travelers of the truthfulness of their experience and of the validity of their opinions. Starting from the idea that semantic and expressive levels of argumentation should not be seen as separated instances, this chapter proposes an analytic framework of online sentiment analysis, which mainly focuses on the users' stylistic and rhetoric choices in a corpus of 100 Trip Advisor reviews of several hotels based in London, UK. The users' communicative behavior is depicted by means of Caffi and Janney (1994)'s emotive devices. Results show that most devices work as reinforcements of the users' inferred evaluative standpoints. The proposed analytic framework may also posit itself as complementary to more traditional frameworks of argumentative analysis.