"Business in the 21st century: description and evaluation in a corpus of "product" pages in business to consumer websites”

Over the centuries, the showcasing of goods has both enhanced their visual communication and has gradually transformed consumption from a collective, social act into a solitary one. The transformation of consumption has been particularly reinforced by Internet. On the one hand, the latter has been progressively exploited by companies to promote their image through the creation of websites. On the other hand, it has increased the solitary many-to-one model of communication between the “product” and the browser (Salvi et al. 2007), or potential consumer, who selects a website, or pages of it, according to his/her interests. Such communication is based on a “dialogue” in a broad sense between the browser and the co-presence of verbal and non-verbal elements in website pages. Websites, as a result, have gradually been transformed into interactive dream worlds or perfect spaces to move in, where the browser is provided with accurate descriptions and evaluations, not only of the products presented, but also of the company’s image and its wider business goals. The creation of such virtual spaces has the function of delivering a company’s identity in seconds through the three basic functions of language: the referential, which provides information about facts and situations related to the real world; the expressive, i.e., the expressiveness of the message delivered; and the vocative or persuasive function, which influences others (Salvi et al. 2007). This paper investigates how description and evaluation are organised in a corpus of “product” pages from business to consumer sites in which products are presented and sold on the web. The study investigates the lexico-grammatical and rhetorical resources typical of description and evaluation as employed in the corpus offering different types of products. These are analysed in a mixed approach: qualitative and quantitative. The findings are illustrated with examples from the corpus divided in three sub-corpora with the purpose of highlighting the rhetorical features which characterise the communicative and persuasive purposes of companies on the web.