“Trappola per turisti, personale gentile e cena gourmet”. I risultati di un’analisi linguistico-testuale delle recensioni dei ristoranti presenti nel web

The review is a multifaceted textual type (Lam [2013]); its analysis may be complex, in light of the several fields the review can be applied to (Fiorentino [2016]). The vast increase in online representations of consumer sentiment offers a powerful new tool for studying consumer attitudes and language expression. Broadly, it can be assessed that the review of commonly used services might touch several areas of the human experience and, for this reason, a linguistic-textual semantic research was executed in order to explore the characteristics and the expression choices of the reviews concerning the restaurant field. The research was conducted on a sample of one-thousand online reviews of different types of restaurant in Lombardy. The reviews were found on the web and were all related to the same period [2020-2022]. The corpus of reviews was analysed in detail by means of text processing and linguistic labelling; the analysis highlighted the most common linguistic-textual characteristics, as well as the most recurrent lexical and expressive features. In addition, the analysis took into consideration the punctuation and the use of loanwords. The linguistic-textual study prompted some considerations about the main features of the online reviews. Furthermore, this analysis highlighted the spread use of strong collocations, rigid phraseological units and paroemias, providing a novel insight in a largely unexplored area of the contemporary Italian language.