  Recent research provides evidence that effective communication in
collaborative software development has significant impact on the software
development lifecycle. Although related qualitative and quantitative studies
point out textual characteristics of well-formed messages, the underlying
semantics of the intertwined linguistic structures still remain largely
misinterpreted or ignored. Especially, regarding quality of code reviews the
importance of thorough feedback, and explicit rationale is often mentioned but
rarely linked with related linguistic features. As a first step towards
addressing this shortcoming, we propose grounding these studies on theories of
linguistics. We particularly focus on linguistic structures of coherent speech
and explain how they can be exploited in practice. We reflect on related
approaches and examine through a preliminary study on four open source
projects, possible links between existing findings and the directions we
suggest for detecting textual features of useful code reviews.
