From pre-owned printers to pristine Porsches - A corpus linguistic analysis of eBay item descriptions

Kehoe, Andrew and Gee, Matt and Lutzky, Ursula (2024) From pre-owned printers to pristine Porsches - A corpus linguistic analysis of eBay item descriptions. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics. ISSN 1384-6655

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Abstract

Recent years have seen a considerable increase in e-commerce, with sales forecast to continue rising over the coming years. This study provides a corpus linguistic analysis of item descriptions on eBay’s UK website, on which both members of the public and businesses can offer goods for sale. It is based on two corpora of items sold on the site in 2015 and 2020 which together contain 412,601 item descriptions and over 57 million words of text. The analysis applies corpus linguistic methods to gain further insight into the diachronic development of language use on eBay, to explore linguistic features in item descriptions and across product categories, and to relate word choice to product selling price. Its findings offer new understanding of the changing language of online selling and indicate how a corpus linguistic methodology may be used to explore the impact of linguistic features on sales figures.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© John Benjamins Publishing Company
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.24063.keh
Dates:	Date Event 18 July 2024 Accepted 3 September 2024 Published Online
Uncontrolled Keywords:	item descriptions, eBay, selling price, e-commerce, word choice
Subjects:	CAH19 - language and area studies > CAH19-01 - English studies > CAH19-01-01 - English studies (non-specific)
Divisions:	Faculty of Arts, Design and Media > College of English and Media
Depositing User:	Gemma Tonks
Date Deposited:	17 Sep 2024 10:33
Last Modified:	17 Sep 2024 10:33
URI:	https://www.open-access.bcu.ac.uk/id/eprint/15849

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