Opinion sharing in online travel communities: A corpus-based comparison of members’ stance expression in Ctrip and Tripadvisor

Abstract

Studies have shown that online opinion sharing represents and helps to rebuild members’ awareness of group belonging. However, there is not yet a consensus on the effect of group membership on the discourse of opinion sharing. In light of this, we built two corpora with data from two popular travel websites—Ctrip and Tripadvisor. By conducting a corpus-based discourse analysis, we compared the two platform users’ discourses of opinion sharing, with a focus on stance. To compare, we controlled for members’ language and their evaluative stances. The results show the following: (1) Tripadvisor users generally utilise far more self-mentions than the remaining stance types, whereas Ctrip members highly prefer hedges in sharing opinion; and (2) as a reviewer’s stance changes from positive to negative, the Ctrip members’ probability of utilising boosters and self-mentions tend to increase, and the chance of hedge deployment decreases sharply, while the opposite is true for Tripadvisor users. These findings suggest that netizens’ discourse of opinion sharing varies in accordance with their self-identification, which could partially be related to their group membership and subjective knowledge of reciprocity.