Impoliteness in negative online consumer reviews: A cross-language and cross-sector comparison

Abstract This article presents a multifaceted comparative investigation into the linguistic impoliteness in the negative online consumer reviews on one of the world’s largest e-commerce tycoons and the flagship giant Amazon. The findings were derived from 600 items of online consumer reviews from two comparative perspectives: cross-language (English vs. Chinese) and cross-sector (daily necessities vs. luxury goods). Four impoliteness strategies were identified, calculated and illustrated based on the collected dataset, ranging from January 2016 to October 2018. Findings indicate that in terms of decreasing frequency, the impoliteness strategies reviews are positive impoliteness, implicated impoliteness, negative impoliteness and sarcasm in the negative online consumer reviews of both languages and both sectors. The results reveal that, regardless of sector and language differences, on-record impoliteness is much more frequent than off-record impoliteness in the genre of online consumer reviews. Despite of similarities, discrepancies were also found with regard to the employment of impoliteness strategies in online consumer reviews across languages and sectors. As a timely effort, the findings offer impoliteness-related insights and implications to both theorists and practitioners in the e-commerce industry.