Politeness and Rating Practices in GoFood Reviews from Samarinda, Indonesia

Abstract

This qualitative descriptive study examines how evaluative language, star ratings, and merchant replies contribute to politeness and accountability in GoFood reviews from Samarinda, Indonesia. The corpus comprises 268 reviews containing text from 16 merchants and nine replies from two merchants. Theory-guided pragmatic analysis draws on Brown and Levinson’s facework, Culpeper’s impoliteness framework, and relational work, applied through an explicit coding protocol and evidence register. The findings distinguish direct problem statements, mitigation through apology and hedging, affiliative praise and gratitude, and aggravation through rebuke and moral judgment. A five-level framework separates rating accompaniment, explicit rating reference, conditional rating, prospective rating, and inferred mitigation. Explicit references to stars account for an awarded score, make a score conditional on one product aspect, or offer a higher score for future performance, while a favourable score beside criticism supports only inferred mitigation. The replies, treated as illustrative rather than representative, offer contrasting presentations of responsibility through driver-based explanations, acceptance of negligence, and promises of improvement; accountability discourse is separated from causal attribution, factual responsibility, and service recovery. The study contributes an evidential distinction between a rating’s contextual contribution and its explicit use by participants.