Discursive construction of subjectivity in English: when travellers complain through their reviews in TripAdvisor

Abstract

In this paper we analyze travellers’ complaints in a corpus of 80 reviews about four hotels, in the opinions categorized as “poor/terrible” and “very good/excellent” from the TripAdvisor platform. The study is carried out from the perspective of interpersonal discourse applied to digital genres of tourism (Mapelli 2008, 2016, Suau Jiménez 2011, 2012a, 2012b, 2014, 2016) with the purpose of characterizing not only the relational aspect between author and reader, but also the propositional one. We focus on complaints since they are a fundamental part of reviews. We approach the construction of subjectivity in the voice of travelers –that of the author- from attitudinal markers, since they contain a high degree of subjectivity and content. However, we also consider hedges, boosters and self-mention markers because they participate in the modeling of those complaints. Results show a differentiated construction of subjectivity in complaints, in both travelers’ opinions categories, positive and negative. It is suggested that the resulting discursive strategies obey the predetermined functional frame of both categories of the reviews. The study offers discursive, methodological and socio-linguistic implications.