Video reaction, trash review, nostalgic review as new evaluative speech genres of the Internet communication

The article presents the results of the linguopragmatic analysis of three evaluative speech genres of the Internet communication: video reaction, trash review and nostalgic review. The study is based on Russian and English YouTube video blogs. Since video reactions, trash reviews and nostalgic reviews originated from the speech genre “Internet review”, their communicative purpose is to evaluate the quality of some content. Nevertheless, all three genres have a number of specific characteristics. Thus, the main peculiarity of video reactions is that they show people watching and commenting on the video they are watching. The key feature of the trash review is that the object of criticism is something initially being considered to be low quality, i.e. the viewers of trash reviews are more interested in how the blogger would express his negative attitudes. As for the nostalgic review, it focuses on once popular films and TV shows which are evaluated from the perspective of the contemporary social attitudes. The ratio between positive and negative evaluation varies depending on the speech genre. However, in all three analyzed speech genres, explicit evaluation significantly prevails over implicit evaluation since blogs (performing primarily the recreational function) do not require a high level of interpretative skills of a recipient. Despite the fact that in the material under study implicit evaluative statements were identified as well, their number is relatively small.

speech genre, evaluative speech genres, reaction video, trash review, nostalgic review, Internet discourse, Internet communication