Corpus Linguistics and the Appraisal Framework for Retrieving Emotion and Stance – The Case of Samsung’s and Apple’s Facebook Pages

The study investigated the situated linguistic interactions of the users of the Samsung and Apple Facebook pages, with a focus on the attitudinal/affectual values they displayed towards these brands and their products, in a comparative perspective. Following Corpus Linguistics (CL) methodology, two corpora were created, named AppleCorpus (7337 tokens) and SamsungCorpus (5216 tokens), consisting in the wall posts on Apple Inc. and Samsung Mobile pages collected over a period of four days. These corpora were scrutinized both in a CL quantitative perspective and in a qualitative perspective by using the resources of the Appraisal Framework (AF) for discourse analysis to better identifying these social network users’ stance and attitudinal positioning. The findings of this pilot study showed that Samsung’s users display a more positive attitude toward the brand than Apple’s users. Results are discussed in the text.