Chapter 2. The role of authorial voice in professional and non-professional reviews of films

Following the Appraisal framework, this paper explores the role of authorial voice in 80 English and Spanish film reviews, half professional and half consumer-generated. The analysis focuses on Engagement, a dialogic category that concerns the relation between what is being stated and other actual or potential view points. The realizations of the Engagement sub categories in there views were submitted to a quantitative analysis, whose results reveal: firstly,a pervasive high frequency of disclaimers (i.e. the sub categories of Deny and Counter), for which an explanation is proposed in terms of the importance of counter-expectation in the film reviews; and secondly, a number of distributional differences among the sub categories, depending on the language and the review type. These differences are discussed in detail.

• Affiliations: 1: Universidad Complutense de Madrid