A COMPARATIVE KEYWORDS ANALYSIS IN PET CAFÉ AND REGULAR CAFÉ REVIEWS: A CORPUS STUDY

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the most frequently used keywords in pet cafés and regular cafes to identify the linguistic discrepancies between the reviews in the two cafes. Self-created corpora of pet cafés and regular cafés reviews were collected from TripAdvisor and Google Maps and used as the main data to compare the linguistic features in each corpus. The analysis was conducted by using AntConc 3.5.9 for Windows (64-bit) to compare the keywords and concordance lines of notable keywords. A comparison of the keyword analysis indicates that the big discrepancies between the two corpora are the use of second-and third-person pronouns in pet café reviews and the use of first-person pronouns in regular café reviews. The choice of this pronoun suggests that in pet café, the writers adopt customer and product-based reviews, whereas, in regular cafés, the writer tends to focus their reviews on author-based reviews. Another notable finding is the absence of Wi-fi in pet café reviews and the absence of adverbs and prepositions in regular cafés. Despite the difference, the reviews in both cafés are heavily dominated by the use of verbs, nouns, and only a small number of adjectives are found in each corpus.