“Oh My God! Buy it!” Analysis on the Characteristics of Anchor’s Speech in Live Broadcast E-Commerce and Purchase Intention: A Linguistic Perspective

As an emerging business model, live broadcast e-commerce is growing rapidly in China in recent years and prompts the emergence of network anchors, attracting the customers to buy a variety of goods in their live broadcasts. In this paper, we take Li Jiaqi, one of most popular live streaming anchors in China as example, collect and transcribe his speech data of live broadcasts to build live broadcast speech-text corpus, and then conduct corpus-based analysis on linguistic characteristics from the aspects of phonetic, usage of various language units, and rhetoric ways, by using the methods and tools from Phonetics, Natural Language Processing, and Corpus Linguistics. Based on the linguistic analysis, we propose the hypothesis that features in the live broadcasts can have some effects on purchase intention of customers, and testify it with questionnaire survey.