Shades of evaluative meaning in web-based company communications: The case of fashion brands

This paper explores how fashion companies use web-based communications to express evaluative meanings. Based on a corpus of texts collected from the websites and Facebook pages of a large sample of fashion brands, the study aims to understand which evaluative meanings are conveyed, which are the most prominent, and whether any patterns of meaning emerge. The analysis focuses on evaluative adjectives which were exhaustively analysed through a combination of different corpus techniques including part-of-speech tagging and semantic annotation. Martin and White’s (2005) appraisal theory was applied to identify different facets of evaluative meaning. The findings suggest that fashion companies exploit web-based communications to convey highly nuanced evaluative meanings that can trigger emotions and perceptions linked to self-identity and social values, well beyond mere aesthetic appreciation related to the appearance and quality of fashion products.