Linguistic Devices Used for Expressing Opinions in Online Novels on the “readAwrite” Website

Abstract

This article aims to investigate the linguistic devices used for expressing opinions in online novels on the readAwrite website by gathering all comments from a fiction section named Yuri or Lesbian Fiction. The researcher employed the purposive selection for collecting only 160 verbal comments in which represented the senders’ purposes. Those comments were obtained from five fictions that were voted as the popular fictions on the weekly charts from December 2020 to January 2021. Linguistic devices theory was employed as a conceptual framework for analyzing and interpreting the data in this study. Then, the descriptive findings were presented orderly and logically. The results revealed that there are eleven categories of speech acts used in those five fictions: 1) Expressive speech acts which can be divided into two main subcategories include positive and negative speech; 2) Claiming; 3 Referring to past experiences; 4) Questioning; 5) Blaming; 6) Advising; 7) Satirical speech acts; 8) Anticipating; 9) Asserting; 10) Expecting; and 11) Comforting. The results also indicated that among the eleven classifications of speech acts, the most dominant speech act frequently used was the expressive speech acts with 64 statements (33.51%). The least dominant speech act used was comforting and referring to past experiences with 6 statements of each type in the same percentage (3.14%). The study of expressing opinions in online novels reflects different aspects of the speaker’s intention and attitude in various ways.