Variación de estilo en interacciones digitales : huéspedes y hoteles en reseñas TripAdvisor

Abstract

In this article we analyse variation in communicative style that appears in guests’ reviews and hotel responses on TripAdvisor, the popular travel and tourism platform. The aim of the study is to examine style features that appear in guests’ opinions and hotel responses. Although many studies in computer-mediated communication have identified informality and orality as key features in this type of communication, more recent studies claim the important communicative and linguistic variation that appears in language in CMO, making it impossible to offer an overview of Spanish on the internet, which instead must be observed in situated discourse practices. The analysis of style variation on a corpus composed of reviews and their responses shows that both guests and hotels exhibit traits of adaptability to the medium in order to achieve their communicative goals, but show different and divergent, if not opposed, communication styles, which reflect the users’ social realities and images, and the potential audiences to whom interactions are addressed, ultimately projecting different perceptions of linguistic standards, while expanding the possibilities of linguistic innovation and expression.

Keywords

• style variation
• consumer reviews
• digital communication
• ; internet pragmatics
• language standard