How do critics express their opinions in online music reviews? An analysis of evaluative language in online album reviews

Evaluation emerges as the overarching purpose of reviewing. While evaluation in book and film reviews was subject to analysis, music reviews have received little attention in this respect. This could be due to the fact that music is ephemeral and hence challenging to evaluate. In order to address this gap, this study explores the language of evaluation in online music reviews. A specialised corpus of 102 online album reviews from three online reviewing websites (Pitchfork, NME and Slant Magazine) published between 2021 and 2022 was compiled. The main research question of the study is: What linguistic resources are employed to convey evaluative meaning in online album reviews? The study combines n-gram analysis in AntConc with manual annotation in QDA Miner qualitative analysis software. The most frequent lexical bundles and p-frames evincing evaluation are extracted. Manual annotation follows the protocol for evaluation devised by Fuoli et al. (2022). The most important methodological implication stemming from the study is that while corpus approach helps extract formulaic lexical resources, manual annotation allows for capturing implicit evaluation that is undetectable in corpus software. The findings show that implicit evaluation plays a significant role in online music reviews and that there is a high level of lexical creativity in the form of metaphor, allusions to pop culture and neologistic multi-element hyphenated compounds. The study demonstrates that the analysis of music reviews as an instance of creative art-related discourse is most effective when quantitative and qualitative approaches are combined. This combination allows for uncovering both the most frequent formulaic lexical resources signalling evaluation as well as creative expressions of evaluation.