Evaluative language in Chinese online food discourse: overall distribution, local patterning, and readers’ involvement

Abstract Internet users often express their evaluation of food in online posts. This study sets out to comprehensively annotate evaluative words in food posts in Chinese, which deserves more attention due to its increasing dominance on the Internet. The corpus includes 180 posts from Dcard, currently the largest anonymous social media platform in Taiwan. All the words annotated to be evaluative are categorized according to their grammatical class, evaluative function, and subjective polarity. We not only provide the frequency distributions of the evaluative words but also conduct four case studies of high-frequency evaluative words, identifying their lexico-syntactic patterns. While previous studies on evaluative language have tended to focus on particular words/phrases, with the data mainly from English, the present study provides a more comprehensive quantitative perspective and extends to Chinese data. Moreover, because conveying evaluations in online forums can be a mediatized performance intended for attention and visibility, our qualitative analysis demonstrates how Dcard users establish readers’ involvement through evaluation.