<![CDATA[The rapid expansion of digital platforms has positioned online hotel reviews as influential forms of user-generated discourse that shape public perceptions of service quality. Against this background, the present study examines how reviewers linguistically construct stance and evaluative meanings in digital hospitality communication. The analysis draws on Stance Theory (Hyland, 2021), Appraisal Theory (Martin & White, 2021), and corpus pragmatics to provide a comprehensive framework for understanding evaluative language. Methodologically, the study employs a mixed-method corpus approach, analyzing more than 17,000 English-language hotel reviews through computational tools, lexical extraction, collocation analysis, and manual annotation of Attitude, Engagement, and Graduation resources. The results show clear distinctions between positive and negative reviews. Positive reviews predominantly use Appreciation and affective stance markers such as clean, friendly, and comfortable, reflecting satisfaction with amenities and overall experience. In contrast, negative reviews contain higher frequencies of Judgment and intensified Graduation markers, including rude, unprofessional, and extremely disappointed, often accompanied by epistemic justifications and narrative complaint structures. Engagement resources further reveal how reviewers align with wider consumer voices to strengthen credibility. Overall, the study concludes that online hotel reviews function as persuasive interpersonal acts shaped by emotional, rhetorical, and cultural factors, offering new insights for applied linguistics and digital media-based hospitality communication.]]>
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