Date of Award

3-1-2017

Thesis Type

masters

Document Type

Thesis (Restricted Access)

Divisions

language

Department

Faculty of Languages and Linguistics

Institution

University of Malaya

Abstract

The ‘Food Culture’ is an increasingly popular notion in our world today. With the Internet, information on various cuisines is easily made available. This phenomenon gives rise to a relatively new digital genre: online food reviews. Hence, this study aims to provide a comprehensive description on online food review focusing on rhetorical strategies. Swales’s Three-Level Genre model is employed to identify the communicative purpose, rhetorical structures and rhetorical strategies of online food review from a popular Malaysian food website, FriedChilies. The analysis of rhetorical structures is based on a conceptualised framework incorporating both Bhatia’s (2004) move structures for advertising discourse and Askehave & Nielsen’s (2005) move structures for online genre. On the other hand, the rhetorical startegies is focused on visuals as move and relevant discourses found in the reviews. Unlike traditional genre analysis, the present research concentrates on exploring the roles of visuals and accompanying discourses in achieving private intentions of the review. Results of the study shows that the move structure confirms that reviews are of a mixed genre. The findings also demonstrated that while reviews are supposed to be more informative, strong promotional elements are subtly incorporated via usage of visuals and different discourses. This indicates that visuals and discourses may influence and manipulate a genre’s communicative purpose which in turn affects the genre type and its generic description.

Note

Dissertation (M.A.) – Faculty of Languages and Linguistics, University of Malaya, 2017.

Additional Files
9935-Angelica_Anthony_Thane.pdf (1302 kB)
Download

Share

COinS