Evaluation in Online Music Reviews: How Internauts Convey Their Opinions

When posters write their reviews, they generally try to compose balanced texts, that is to say that reviews may contain positive and less positive elements, usually motivated by a valid reason which may encounter the favour of the readers or not. Reviwers may use politeness strategies to criticise albums without being too harsh or offend possible readers. One of these strategies is “concession” (Barth, 2000).
Concession can be considered a form of politeness as it helps posters preserve their face. In other words, even thought there is not a direct interaction, reviewers may mention something already written or read in other websites in order to express a counterargument without offending previous posters, but having “room to manoeuvre” and attending to the recipient's need for politeness (Barth, 2000:418). Reviewers, for instance while expressing a negative feature of an album, may highlight one of its positive feature (they indeed concede there is a positive side) and then affirm the contrary.
In this way, they express their opinions, but without being too sharp.
When a poster/reviewer concedes, he/she recognises the validity of an assertion, before expressing his/her opposite point of view. This strategy may result more incisive when the aim is to persuade the reader.
Among the features concerning concession, reprise markers and concession markers are important.
Concession markers are, for instance, although, while, even though, I agree, I know that and are used to “concede” the validity of a speaker's/writer's assertion and to summarize a previous discussion; reprise markers, instead, are for example but, however, yet, nevertheless and are used to point out that the concessionary material is over and an opposite opinion/point of view is to come. According to Antaki and Wetherell (1993:13), the concessionary element has three functions: it does something retrospective, casting light on what has gone before as being in some way “disputable”. The preposition calls the participant's attention to the source in which the later reprise will find its original prepositions; it also does something prospective, introducing what is to come immediately next as being material offered as counter-evidence to the proposition.